Jean Plattard once suggested that, like all the major French poets of the midsixteenth century, Pierre de Ronsard overwhelmingly preferred the narrative-type,1 historical and mythological painting produced at the Chateau de Fontainebleau by artists such as Il Rosso and Primaticcio to the concurrent genre of courtly portraiture practiced by painters such as François Clouet and Corneille de Lyon: "Les poetes donnaient naturellement a ces peintures historiques et mythologiques la preference sur les portraits." 2 The appeal, Plattard believed, was two-fold. On the one hand, there was "l'ampleur de la conception" (p. 492) of narrative painting-its conceptual magnitude, or ability to represent multiple (yet related) subject matters in a single frame. On the other hand, there was its "hardiesse et . . . liberte de l'imagination" (p. 492)-its imaginative boldness, as demonstrated by the ability of narrative painting to give form to the purely conceptual truths of ideal Nature (to borrow the Neoplatonic terminology of the period). For Plattard, Ronsard considered these qualities "comme caracteristiques du genie de la poesie et des arts en general" (p. 492)
