Renaissance scholar and poet who wrote highly polished portraits known as miniatures; member of the Pléiade, a literary circle that sought to enrich French literature by reviving the classical tradition in poetry by the use of Greco-Latin themes, forms, and rhetorical devices. A contemporary of the poet Pierre de Ronsard at the Collège de Cocqueret, Belleau at first gained the patronage of the Abbé Chretophle de Choiseul and later of Charles IX and Henry III, who made him secretary of the king´s chamber.
He took part in a champaign against Naples in 1557 and from about 1563 lived at Joinville as tutor and counsellor to the Guises, a powerful Catholic family. It was the Château de Guise that inspired La Bergerie (1565-72), a collection of pastoral odes, sonnets, hymns, and amorous verse.
Belleau´s detailed descriptions of nature and works of art earned him a reputation as a miniaturist in poetry and prompted Ronsard to characterize him a a painter of nature.
His other poetic works include didactic verse; Les Amours et nouveaux échanges des pierres précieuses (1576), a commentary on exotic stones and their inherent secret virtues written in the tradition of the medieval lapidaries; La Reconnue (1577), a comedy in verse based on Plautus Casina; and a macaronic poem on the religious wars.
His erudite translations of Anacreon´s Odes (1556) won him the seventh seat or star in the constellation of the Pléiade, a name the group adopted in imitation of a group of eminent Greek poets of 250 BC.
(his collected works were edited an published in 1867)
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