To this end, he imported such major artists as he could; Michelangelo he failed to obtain, but he did get the ageing Leonardo. Rosso he imported in 1520, Primaticcio in 1532; Niccolo delPAbbate, Vignola, Serlio, Andrea del Sarto, Cellini, all came; some stayed, some went back; but the work they left behind was decisive in that from this ‘infection’ from Italian sources Gothic died, to be replaced at first with hybrid and garbled forms of Italianism.

p 142

The Wars of Religion put an end to nearly all patronage in the later years of the century, and when the arts began to revive under Henry IV the original Fontainebleau sources were still drawn on, plus the Flemish Italianizers who imported still further distortions into what they took from Italy. People like Ambroise Dubois, a Fleming who settled in France, where he died in 16 14, or Toussaint Dubreuil, who died in 1602, continue the fantastic distortions, the erotic nude; but the spark is dead, and the weak drawing, and the confusions of space and scale, mask the poverty of imagination and style. Only Antoine Caron, who died in 1600, still impresses as an extreme of sophisticated court art;

i2i caron The Massacres of the Triumvirate, 1566