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| Master of the Aeneid Aeneas entreats Anchises to flee Troy ca. 1530-40 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Master of the Aeneid Aeneas offers Sacrifice to the Gods of the Lower World ca. 1530-40 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Master of the Aeneid Descent of Aeneas into Hell ca. 1530-40 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Master of the Aeneid Suicide of Dido ca. 1530-40 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
"Since the Middle Ages, the city of Limoges in central France thrived on the artistic production of enamel on metal. Similar in composition to glass, enamel consists of silica and a fluxing agent colored by metallic oxide or carbonate and fused to a metal surface by heat. From the twelfth through the fifteenth century, Limoges enamel painters gouged into the surface of the metal (champlevé) or raised thin dams between areas of color (cloisonné) to establish the design and to prevent pigments from mixing. By the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, materials and techniques developed that permitted painters to apply enamels more freely to copper surfaces, without obvious demarcations between areas of color, in a manner that approached the painting of oil on panels or canvas. Unlike oil painting, enameled metal retains its hue without fading, or tel que l'ambre une fleur (like a flower in amber), as the poet Théophile Gautier wrote in a sonnet to the nineteenth-century enamel painter Claudius Popelin."
"This technical development paralleled the growing cult of antiquity in France and the widespread circulation of printed images. While religious themes had dominated Limoges enamels in the Middle Ages and continued to cover the surfaces of Limoges plaques particularly in the first third of the sixteenth century, images of Greek and Roman subjects, readily available to painters through engravings and woodcuts, predominated from the 1530s. The earliest series of Limoges plaques based on classical rather than religious subjects drew from the Aeneid. It is also the largest: eighty-two plaques are known. . . . The production of this series is hardly surprising, since ancient texts in the original and in translation had a wide readership in the literate society of France at this time. Courtly and allegorizing so-called Troy romances still circulated, but scholars like Guillaume Budé encouraged a new appreciation of more accurate versions of the epics."
– excerpted from Images of Antiquity in Limoges Enamels in the French Renaissance by Ian Wardropper, from the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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| Jean Pénicaud the Younger Personification of Temperance ca. 1540-45 enamel on copper (grisaille) Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Pierre Pénicaud Acrobats ca. 1550 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Pierre Reymond The Bad Shepherd 1537 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Pierre Reymond Jael and Sisera ca. 1550 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Pierre Reymond Solomon turning to Idolatry ca. 1550-75 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Pierre Courteys Cupid and Psyche ca. 1550 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Pierre Courteys and workshop Susanna and the Elders ca. 1580 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Léonard Limosin Dido, Queen of Carthage ca. 1564-65 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Léonard Limosin Aeneas, Prince of Troy ca. 1564-65 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
"An important aspect of art in the provinces was the revival of the technique of enamel at Limoges in the second half of the fifteenth century after an interruption of nearly a hundred years. The technique of painted enamel made it possible to produce new effects with greater ease than in the old method of champlevé enamel, thought the results were less brilliant. . . . The middle of the sixteenth century also saw the flowering of the school of painted enamels at Limoges, which in the person of Léonard Limosin produced an artist of a high order."
– from Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700 by Anthony Blunt, revised by Richard Beresford (first published in 1953, reissued with revisions by Yale University Press in 1999)
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| Léonard Limosin Goddess Ops ca. 1540-49 enamel on copper (grisaille) Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Léonard Limosin Hercules in his Cradle strangling Serpents 1570 enamel on copper (grisaille) Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Jean Limosin the Elder Annunciation 1605 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Jean Limosin the Elder Resurrection 1605 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Jean Limosin the Younger Susanna and the Elders ca. 1625 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Suzanne de Court Annunciation ca. 1600 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |