| Summary: | Charles le Brun painted two Mays, four years apart, for the Parisian goldsmiths’ confraternity, Sainte-Anne-Saint-Marcel. In the Marian fraternal tradition they were offered to Notre-Dame cathedral: The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew (1647) and The Stoning of Saint Stephen (1651). The two imposing paintings mark a break in the Mays series and influenced religious paintings during the seventeenth century. During the 1660s the goldsmiths’ Mays resume the powerful style and display of energy found in Charles Le Brun’s stagings, while leaving room for variations in interpretation. From the year 1670 onwards, the stylistic influence of Le Brun on the goldsmiths series was reduced, but his compositions evoking martyrdom and arousing passions were used by the Church as models for religious imagery. The Mays then achieved a wide ideological and political diffusion in the kingdom’s churches. These two types of complementary dissemination show how Le Brun’s language answered the Church of France’s need for images.
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