ANGUIER, François

Sculptor, part of a French family of sculptors. Honoré Anguier (c. 1570-1648) was a carpenter, wood-carver and small-scale entrepreneur in Eu, Normandy. Local church archives document his work on doors, frames, balustrades and retables. His eldest son, François Anguier, became noted for his funerary sculpture but also contributed to decorative schemes for ecclesiastic and secular buildings. His younger son, Michel Anguier, worked in Rome before returning to Paris where he enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage and became a distinguished teacher and lecturer at the Académie Royale. Both François and Michel introduced a new Roman influence, helping to form the classicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration. style in France. A third brother, Guillaume Anguier (1628-1708), was a successful decorative painter, working at various royal residences; one of his daughters married the sculptor Domenico Cucci. Catherine Anguier, sister of François, Michel and Guillaume, was the mother of the sculptor David Bouderelle, who inherited the family house and studio.

By 1621 François Anguier was apprenticed to a wood-carver, Martin Caron in Abbeville, and later he joined the Paris workshop of Simon Guillain. According to d'Argenville he went to England, where he was able to save enough to finance a stay of two years in Italy, where he was joined by his brother Michel. Neither trip is documented, but his later work suggests an association with Alessandro Algardi, or at least the influence of the temperate style that Algardi and François Duquesnoy were practising as an alternative to the High BaroqueGLOSSARYThe period in art history from about 1600 to about 1750. In this sense the term covers a wide range of styles and artists. In painting and sculpture there were three main forms of Baroque: (1) sumptuous display, a style associated with the Catholic Counter Reformation and the absolutist courts of Europe (Bernini, Rubens); (2) dramatic realism (Caravaggio); and (3) everyday realism, a development seen in particular in Holland (Rembrandt, Vermeer). In architecture, there was an emphasis on expressiveness and grandeur, achieved through scale, the dramatic use of light and shadow, and increasingly elaborate decoration. In a more limited sense the term Baroque often refers to the first of these categories. The development of the Baroque reflects the period's religious tensions (Catholic versus Protestant); a new and more expansive world view based on science and exploration; and the growth of absolutist monarchies. of Bernini.

François returned to France in 1643, and in 1649-52 he was engaged on the Montmorency tomb at Moulins. This tomb reveals the new Roman influence which the Anguiers introduced into France. By the late 1640s he was documented as a 'sculpteur ordinaire du roi' and was living in the Tuileries. In his later period he continued along the lines indicated in the Montmorency tomb.