For hundreds of years, French kings and nobles imported their painters and architects from Italy. But the Age of Enlightenment brought self-confidence and arrogance, and by the 18th century, Italian art had become unfashionable in France. One French art collector boasted that Florence, Rome, Venice and the other city-states had no painters to rival Watteau, Fragonard and Chardin.
Over the past two decades, due to the influence of curators who are 18th-century specialists, including Pierre Rosenberg, the director of the Louvre, and Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnee, the director of the Lille Palais des Beaux Arts, 18th-century Italian art - the Settecento - has found a following.
Rosenberg discovered two of the masterpieces on exhibit in Settecento, the Cen- tury of Tiepolo at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille. Gian Antonio Guardi's now stunningly restored Supper at Emmaus mouldered unnoticed in a boarding school chapel in Eure-et-Loire until 1995. Twenty-one years earlier, he uncovered - in a store-room at the museum of Troyes - Bernardo Bellotto's breathtaking 1766 canvas of Dresden in ruins after a Prussian bombardment. The painting is eerily similar to photographs of the same city after the second World War.
Brejon de Lavergnee, the curator of the Lille exhibition, says it is his favourite of the 114 paintings borrowed from 44 provincial museums, three Paris museums and two churches in western France. "It poses the questions: what are we doing on earth? And why are there wars?" he says.
It took a team of French art historians 10 years to catalogue all of the Settecento paintings in France. They judiciously chose from more than 1,000 canvasses scattered through 200 museums and churches for show first in Lyon and now in Lille.
The exhibition, organised according to the "schools" of Bologna, Rome, Naples and Venice, lays to rest the old French prejudice against the Settecento. The styles are rich and varied.
"Each school was independent from the others; and within schools the artists were independent from one another," says Brejon de Lavergnee. Perhaps the most surprising painter to re-emerge from the cupboard of art history is Alessandro Magnasco, recently the subject of a major exhibition in Milan. Magnasco was the only Settecento painter who had a social conscience, no doubt caught from the philosophers he knew.
Magnasco's Arrival of Galley Slaves in Genoa Prison and Embarcation of Galley Slaves in Genoa Port belong to the Bordeaux museum. In both paintings, Magnasco used shades of brown, grey and green to recreate the squalor and damp of the prison and galleys. Turkish slaves, identifiable by their ponytails, prod prisoners with sticks, pull them by chains and swing one from a rope by his arms. "These are more than paintings," Brejon de Lavergnee says. "They convey doubts on the future of humanity. They ask how man can send his brothers to the galley, how man can torture."
The 18th-century English painter, Joshua Reynolds, wrote of his admiration for Giuseppe Maria Crespi's Conquering Love, or Ingenio, which is on loan from the Strasbourg museum. Crespi, known as Lo Spagnolo, used a palette of warm browns and yellows, and Carvaggio-like contrasts between light and shadow.
Conquering Love, his portrait of a winged adolescent holding a bow and wearing a helmet topped by an eagle, shows Crespi's interest in sculpture. There can be few greater portrayals of agony than the face of Crespi's Christ Falling Beneath the Cross.
PEACEFUL, prosperous Venice dominated Settecento Italy, and the Venetian painters, Guardi, Canaletto and Tiepolo, remain those best known abroad. All three are well represented in Lille. The presence of eight paintings by Francesco Guardi, the brother-in-law of Tiepolo, shows Guardi was the most popular in France. His series of ceremonial episodes from the life of the Doge - the Doge receiving foreign ambassadors, the Doge carried across the Piazza San Marco while guards beat onlookers back with poles, the Doge crossing to the Lido on his red and gold boat - once belonged to the Marquise de Pompadour.
Canaletto painted his breathtaking View of la Salute from the Entry to the Grand Canal on copper, which helps to explain its strange luminosity. Like his nephew, Belotto, who painted ruined Dresden, Canaletto painted his vedute, or views, of cities with almost photographic exactness, usually at the dawn or dusk "witching hour" favoured by photographers and cameramen. His canvases seem to vibrate with light, and even the mass production of cheap copies has not detracted from the beauty of the originals.
Giambattista Tiepolo is considered the greatest decorator of the Settecento for his rococo ceiling frescoes. But some of his religious and historical paintings are more powerful than the froth of cherubs leaning over clouds, or his kitch Immaculate Conception. In Saint Roch, the saint known for curing plague victims is bathed in yellow light, his own plague boil showing on his thigh. Tiepolo's Portrait of a Bearded Man, part of a series of philosophers' heads, has the depth of character of a Rembrandt.
Tiepolo's son, Gian Domenico, painted The New World, a little gem of a picture. Shown from the back, Venetians dressed in carnival costume peep into a contraption where coloured images of America are projected. A man perched on a stool and holding a stick explains the images to them.
Long mis-attributed to Tiepolo, Giambattista Pittoni's Eliezer and Rebecca shows the old testament story of the servant dispatched to find a bride for Isaac, at the moment of recognition when Rebecca has given him water to drink from the well. She lowers her eyes demurely and holds out a soft white arm, around which Eliezer's gnarled hands fasten a string of pearls.
The importance of the 18th century as a turning point between ancient and modern, between religious tradition and humanism, is obvious in the work of Francesco Solimena, the most successful Neapolitan artist of his day, who painted in every style.
It is hard to believe Solimena's Annunciation and Portrait of a Woman were painted in the same era, let alone by the same artist. In the ridiculous Annunciation, dated around 1700, the red, white and blue of the angel's tricolour wings are repeated in the laughing Virgin's robes, while five fat cherubs whisper on a cloud.
But Solimena's Woman, painted only five years later, could be a hymn to the Enlightenment; she is natural, proud, intelligent and liberated in her loosely draped clothes and turban, a precursor of the figure of Marianne, symbol of the French revolution.
Settecento: The Century of Tiepolo is at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Place de la Republique, Lille, until April 30th. Closed Monday mornings and all day Tuesdays.