The Italian Wing of the Jacquemart-André Museum

Why an Italian wing, in the heart of Second Empire Paris

The mansion on Boulevard Haussmann was built between 1869 and 1875 by the architect Henri Parent, commissioned by Édouard André (1833-1894), heir to one of the great fortunes of the Second Empire. At the outset, nothing there hinted at an Italian museum: the house was designed for entertaining and society life. The turning point came with Édouard André's marriage to the portrait painter Nélie Jacquemart, on 29 June 1881. Nélie drew her husband to Italy, and their shared passion for the Florentine and Venetian Renaissance drove them to return there almost every year.

The couple did not buy at random on their travels: over nearly thirty years, they built close ties with leading Italian dealers, including the Florentine antiquarian Stefano Bardini and the Venetian Michelangelo Guggenheim, and surrounded themselves with recognised experts such as Wilhelm von Bode and Georges Lafenestre. This network allowed them to bring together around 2,500 works from the major Italian artistic centres — paintings, sculptures, objets d'art — a good many of which found their place in the rooms fitted out for that purpose. The Uccello painting in the Florentine room illustrates the buying mechanics of the period well: spotted by Nélie Jacquemart in the palace of a Florentine dealer, it could not be exported directly from Italy; she eventually acquired it at an auction in London, in 1899.

Édouard André died in 1894, before the Italian ensemble was fully arranged. Nélie carried on alone for eighteen years: she completed the fitting-out of the Italian rooms — the sculpture gallery was assembled after her husband's death — while also extending the collection into other fields. On her death, on 15 May 1912, she bequeathed the entire collection and the mansion to the Institut de France. The museum opened to the public in 1913.

1. Florentine Room — Saint George and the Dragon, Paolo Uccello

Painted around 1430-1435, this wood panel (131 x 103 cm) is considered the rarest piece in the museum's Italian collection. It shows Saint George running the dragon through with his lance, just as it was about to devour the king's daughter — a traditional subject, treated here with an eye already turned toward modernity.

The detail worth studying is the construction of the landscape: a large cave splits the composition in two, each half organising its own vanishing point and its own background. Uccello, obsessed with perspective, thus layers a still-archaic vision (the dragon stylised like a Gothic coat of arms, the princess treated as a medallion) over a spatial construction that was strikingly new for its time.

2. Florentine Room — Two Virgin and Child paintings, Botticelli and Perugino

The Florentine room brings together, side by side, two Virgin and Child paintings from the same Florentine workshop, that of Andrea del Verrocchio: one, dated around 1470, long attributed to Verrocchio himself before being recognised as an early work by Sandro Botticelli (oil on panel, 62 x 48 cm); the other, also dated around 1470, painted by his fellow pupil Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, known as Perugino (oil on panel, 61 x 41 cm), at one point given to Pollaiuolo because of its Flemish accents.

Placing the two panels side by side allows a comparison of two pupils trained in the same workshop: in Botticelli's painting, a 1995 restoration revealed the very fine rendering of the Virgin's veil, jewellery and locks of hair; in Perugino's, it is the landscape background — rather than the traditional gold ground — that stands out, with a treatment of atmosphere influenced by Flemish painting, while the modelling of the face and the quality of the drawing secure the attribution.

3. Venetian Room — The Flight into Egypt (Botticelli) and Virgin and Child on a Throne (Bellini)

The Flight into Egypt (oil on canvas, 151 x 89 cm) is, according to the museum's official notice, dated 1510 and attributed to Sandro Botticelli assisted by a collaborator for the figure of Saint Joseph — a date that corresponds to the year of the painter's death and thus places its execution right at the very end of his career, or even its completion by the workshop. The attribution itself was long doubted: a certain clumsiness in the composition and a transfer from panel to canvas after the artist's death were both suspected, two hypotheses now dismissed by the museum. The painting differs from better-known versions of the subject (Titian, Carpaccio): here Mary stands holding the Child in her arms, while the donkey grazes beside her instead of carrying her.

Nearby, the Virgin and Child on a Throne by Giovanni Bellini (wood panel, 131 x 103 cm, around 1510) shows the Virgin seated on a monumental throne, a drape hanging behind her, on an open-air terrace lined with a balustrade and opening onto a landscape. Nélie Jacquemart had bought it with no attribution; it was only in the 1930s that the painting was recognised as a work by Bellini. The play of lines is worth pausing over: the vertical of the throne and the horizontal of the drape form a cross that only the Virgin's silhouette, wrapped in a long dark cloak, softens.

4. Venetian Room — Ecce Homo (Mantegna) and The Embassy of Hippolyta (Carpaccio)

Andrea Mantegna's Ecce Homo (oil on canvas, 54 x 42 cm), dated around 1500, is one of the most disturbing paintings in the collection: Christ is shown half-length and naked, covered in whip marks, his wrists bound and a rope knotted around his neck — an unusual treatment for this subject. The tight framing on the faces, treated in an almost caricatural way to express the executioners' rage, and the almost sculptural density of the figures, long cast doubt on the attribution to Mantegna, before exhibitions at the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum confirmed it.

By contrast, The Embassy that Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, sends to Theseus, King of Athens, by Vittore Carpaccio (oil on panel, 102 x 145 cm, around 1495), is one of the rare secular scenes in the Italian collection. Drawing on Boccaccio's Teseida, Carpaccio turns a mythological episode into a scene of Venetian court life, with Theseus shown as a bearded old man. The exact subject of the scene was only identified long after the painting was bought by the Andrés, who had acquired it as an authenticated work by Carpaccio — a painter very few of whose paintings have survived the centuries.

How long to allow

The two rooms are visited one after the other, continuing on from the sculpture gallery. Allow around 22 to 28 minutes for both if you stop at the works described here.

Florentine Room (Uccello, Botticelli, Perugino) — 10 minutes.
Venetian Room (Botticelli, Bellini, Mantegna, Carpaccio) — 15 minutes.

Sources and verification

This article draws on the official notices of the Jacquemart-André Museum, on the Institut de France, and on cross-checked sources (INHA/Agorha, Wikipedia) for every date and attribution.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Musée Jacquemart-André website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.