Artist: Salvador Dalí
Title: Portrait de Ronsard
Medium: Original Etching with drypoint extensively handcoloured in gouache and gold paint,
Serie: Les Amours de Cassandre
Year: 1968
Edition: 95
Sizes: 28x38cm
Publisher-editor: published by Pierre Argillet, printed by the Atelier Robbe, Paris, with the artist's blindstamp
Bibliograph/Published: Michler & Löpsinger 248
Signature: Signed on pencil right
Condition: original conditions
September 1524 – 27 December 1585) was a French poet or, as his own generation in France called him, a "prince of poets".
De Ronsard was born at Manoir de la Possonnière in the village of Couture-sur-Loir, Vendômois. His father served Francis I as maître d'hôtel du roi. Ronsard received an education at home before attending the Collège de Navarre in Paris at age nine. He later traveled extensively, including visits to Scotland, Flanders, and Holland. After a hearing impairment halted his diplomatic career, Ronsard dedicated himself to study at the Collège Coqueret.
He became the acknowledged leader of the Pléiade, a group of seven French poets aiming to apply classical criticism and scholarship to the vernacular. Ronsard was a prolific writer, and his work was both admired and criticized throughout his life. His reputation was established by critics such as Sainte-Beuve, and his poetry is characterized by its magnificence of language and imagery and graceful variety of metre.
in 1552 he publish his Amours de Cassandre with the fifth book of Odes, dedicated to the 15-year-old Cassandre Salviati, whom he had met at Blois and followed to her father's Château de Talcy. These books excited a violent literary quarrel. Marot was dead, but he left numerous followers, some of whom saw in the stricter literary critique of the Pléiade, in its outspoken contempt of merely vernacular and medieval forms, in its strenuous advice to French poetry to "follow the ancients," and so forth, an insult to the author of the Adolescence Clémentine and his school.
