Charles Carmoy

The tall Diana striding with her dog in the Louvre's Fontainebleau gallery was once credited to Primaticcio, the Italian who led the decoration of the royal château at Fontainebleau, and later catalogued as anonymous. The museum now gives her to Charles Carmoy, one of the painters who worked alongside him. The name was proposed by the historians Maurice Roy and Sylvie Béguin and confirmed by setting drawings against the archives.

Almost everything else about Carmoy comes from payment records. He was from Orléans and is documented from 1537 to about 1558. He painted at Fontainebleau and in the chapel at Vincennes, worked for Cardinal Du Bellay, a diplomat and patron, and by 1550 was painter to Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of King Henri II, who took the huntress goddess as her own emblem. In 1552 the writer Rabelais named him in his Fourth Book as "Master Charles Charmois, painter to the king". His birth and death dates are unknown. A restoration in 2024 removed strips of canvas that had been added on three sides in the 19th century.