of the French court. In 1475 he was appointed painter to
Louis XI.
Fouquet’s key work of manuscript illumination is the
dismembered Book of Hours of Étienne Chevalier, which
probably dates from between 1452 and 1461, and of
which the largest surviving part is preserved in Chantilly.
The Munich Boccaccio, illuminated by Fouquet and his
atelier, was begun about 1459; at about the same time he
began decorating the Paris Grandes Chroniques de France
for King Charles VII. In 1465 he executed a single minia-
ture for the Book of Hours of Charles de France, brother
of Louis XI. This and other undated illuminations, proba-
bly of the same decade, indicate how the Hours of Étienne
Chevalier remained the model for his devotional minia-
tures. His frontispiece to the Statutes of the Order of St.
Michel in Paris dates from about 1470 and his illumina-
tions in the duke of Nemours’s copy of the Antiquités Ju-
daïques were completed by 1476. His latest manuscript
illuminations are a series of detached pages in Paris and
Amsterdam from a manuscript of the Histoire ancienne.
Fouquet’s few surviving panel paintings comprise the por-
traits of Gonella (Vienna), Charles VII (Paris), Guillaume
Jouvénal des Ursins (Paris), the divided diptych of
Étienne Chevalier and the Virgin (Berlin and Antwerp),
and the large Deposition altarpiece (Nouans).
Fouquet’s style, originally of Franco-Flemish deriva-
tion, was transformed by his experiences in Italy and his
work reveals ideas appropriated from Fra ANGELICO, AN-
DREA DEL CASTAGNO, DONATELLO, and even GIOTTOand
DUCCIO. A highly intellectual artist, he employed classical
architectural details to “label” specific non-French loca-
tions, including Italy, the classical world, and even par-
adise. He understood ALBERTI’s system of one-point
PERSPECTIVE, but did not adopt it wholeheartedly as its use
threatened to disrupt the unity of text and pictures in his
manuscripts. The most significant French artist of the
15th century, he profoundly influenced later illuminators
such as Jean Bourdichon (died 1521) and Jean Perréal
(died 1530).
Foxe, John (1516–1587) English Calvinist martyrologist
He studied at Oxford and became a Fellow of Magdalen
College (1539–45), but fled to the Continent on the
accession of the Catholic Mary I. Moving between the
main centers of the Protestant Reformation, he met other
English refugees and wrote a Latin history of religious
persecution (Strasbourg, 1554). He expanded this in Eng-
lish translation into the work with which he is forever as-
sociated: the Acts and Monuments of these latter and
perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church (1563), uni-
versally known as “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” Foxe himself
returned to England in 1559, and his book’s testimony to
the heroism of the Protestant martyrs under Mary, to-
gether with its vivid woodcuts, made it immensely popu-
lar. It was officially promoted by the bishops, and Foxe
119900 FFooxxee,, JJoohhnnGirolamo FracastoroA woodcut of the author appearing in
his Homocentrica(1538), in which he insisted that all
heavenly bodies rotate in circular orbits about the sun. He is
holding an armillary sphere.brought out three further editions in his lifetime (1570,
1576, 1583).Fracastoro, Girolamo (c. 1478–1553) Italian physician,
poet, and astronomer
Coming from a wealthy Veronese family, Fracastoro was
educated at the university of Padua, where he also taught
briefly. In 1508 he returned to Verona to run the family es-
tates. He managed nonetheless to produce two important
medical works. The first, a poem in Latin hexameters
called Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Syphilis or the French
disease; 1530), not only introduced the term “syphilis” to
medical parlance but also contained a detailed description
of the disease. In the second work, De contagione (1546),
Fracastoro argued that some diseases spread by seminaria
contagium (contagious seeds), in other words germs, but
no attention was paid to his suggestive ideas. He was also
ahead of his time in postulating that fossil mussels dis-
covered (1517) in rocks at Verona were remains of crea-
tures that had once lived in the vicinity. In astronomy
Fracastoro proved less innovative. His Homocentrica
(1538) insisted against Ptolemy (see PTOLEMAIC SYSTEM)
that all heavenly bodies move, without epicycle or eccen-
tric, around the sun in circular orbit. His dialogue Nau-