The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  The art of landscape gardening, like so much else, had come from Italy, bringing a hundred devices and surprises; bowers, trellises, grottoes, caves, grotesques, colored stones, bird houses, statues, vases, brooks, fountains, waterspouts, even organs played by running water. Le Nôtre had already designed the gardens at Vaux for Fouquet; soon he would design the Jardins des Tuileries for the Queen, and the gardens at St.-Cloud for Madame Henrietta, and the gardens at Chantilly for Le Grand Condé. At Versailles, from 1662 onward, Louis gave him carte blanche, and Colbert was appalled at the expense incurred in transforming a disheveled wilderness into acres of paradise. The King fell in love with Le Nôtre, who cared not for money but only for beauty, and in whom there was no guile. 9 He was the Boileau of gardens, resolved to turn the “disorder” of nature into order, harmony, and reasonable, intelligible form. Perhaps he was too insistently classical, but his creation remains, after three hundred years, one of the meccas of mankind.

  Still envious of Fouquet, Louis brought Vaux’s architect, Le Vau, to enlarge the hunting lodge into a royal palace. Jules Hardouin-Mansard took over the direction in 1670, and began the vast apartments, galleries, reception rooms, dance halls, guardrooms, and administrative offices that are now Versailles. By 1685 there were thirty-six thousand men and six thousand horses laboring on the enterprise, sometimes working in night and day shifts. Colbert long ago had warned the King that such architecture, added to war after war, would bankrupt the treasury; but in 1679 Louis built another palace at Marly as an escape from the crowds at Versailles, and in 1687 he added the Grand Trianon as a retreat for Mme. de Maintenon. He ordered an army of men, including many of his regular troops, to divert the River Eure and carry its waters through ninety miles of the “Aqueduct of Maintenon” to supply the lakes, streams, fountains, and baths of Versailles; in 1688, after huge expenditures, this enterprise was abandoned at the call of war. All in all, Versailles—buildings, furniture, decoration, gardens, and aqueducts—had by 1690 cost France 200,000,000 francs ($500,000,000?). 10

  Architecturally, Versailles is too complex and haphazard to approach perfection. The chapel is brilliant, but such flaunting of decoration hardly accords with the humility of prayer. Parts of the palace are beautiful, and the stairways to the gardens are majestic; but the compulsion laid upon the designers to leave the hunting lodge intact, merely adding wings and ornament, injured the appearance of the whole. Sometimes the proliferating pile leaves an impression of cold monotony and labyrinthine repetition—one room after another to a spread of 1,320 frontal feet. The internal arrangements seem to have ignored physiological convenience, and to have presumed upon remarkable retentive power in noble vesicles. Half a dozen rooms had to be traversed to reach the goal of desire; no wonder we hear of stairways and hallways serving in such emergencies. The rooms themselves appear too small for comfort. Only the Grande Galerie is spacious, extending 320 feet along the garden front. There the decorators deployed all their skills—hanging Gobelin and Beauvais tapestries, scattering sculpture along the walls, making every piece of furniture lovingly perfect, and reflecting all the splendor in those great mirrors that gave the room its second name, Galerie des Glaces. On the ceiling Le Brun, rising to the height of his art, painted through five years (1679–84) and mythological symbols the triumphs of the long reign, and unwittingly its tragedy; for these pictured victories over Spain, Holland, and Germany were to arouse the Furies against the war-fond King.

  Louis lived there, on and off, from 1671, spending part of his time at Marly, St.-Germain, and Fontainebleau; after 1682 it was his permanent home. But we do him injustice when we think of Versailles as his residence and playground; he himself occupied a moderate fraction of the structure; the rest housed his wife, children, and grandchildren, his mistresses, the foreign legations, the chief administrators, the court, and all the servantry required by royalty. Doubtless some part of the magnificence had a political purpose—to awe the ambassadors, who were expected to judge from this luxury the resources and power of the state. They and other visitors were duly impressed, and they spread through Europe such reports of Versailles’ splendor that it became the envy and model of a dozen courts and palaces throughout the Continent. In the aftermath of the reign the great mass seemed to people an insolent symbol of despotism, a reckless challenge of human pride to unchanging human fate.

  III. DECORATION

  The arts of decoration had never known, even under the Renaissance popes, such encouragement and display. Thickly carpeted floors, ornamental columns, massive tables and chimneypieces, porcelain vases, silver candelabra, crystal chandeliers, marble clocks inlaid with gems, walls paneled or frescoed or hung with pictures or tapestries, cornices elegantly molded, ceilings coffered or painted—these and a dozen other forms of art, in Versailles, Fontainebleau, Marly, the Louvre, even in private palaces, made almost every room a museum of objects charming eye and soul with the mystery of perfection. From Raphael and his aides—Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, Giovanni da Udine—and the Loggie of the Vatican, Le Brun and his aides took their palette of gods, goddesses, Cupids, trophies, emblems, arabesques, garlands of flowers and leaves, cornucopias of the fruits of the earth, to decorate the record of the royal triumphs over women and states.

  In the style of Louis XIV furniture was lavish and gorgeous; here classic simplicity yielded to baroque ornament. Chairs were often so carved, upholstered, and petitpointed as to frighten away all but the most exquisite bottoms; on the other hand, tables could be heavy and solid to the point of apparent immobility. Writing tables and “secretaries” were of an elegance inviting the pen to compose with the pithy precision of La Rochefoucauld or the bubbling vivacity of Mme. de Sévigné. Chests and cabinets were in many cases laboriously carved, and/or inlaid with designs in metal or jewelry. André Charles Boulle, who was settled in the Louvre (1672) as the favorite cabinetmaker of Louis XIV, gave his name (“buhlwork”) to his special art of inlaying furniture—preferably ebony—with engraved metal, tortoise shell, mother-of-pearl, etc., and adding floral or animal scrolls of the most graceful design. One of his inlaid cabinets brought £3,000 in 1882, probably equal to $50,000 in 1960; 11 Boulle, however, died in extreme poverty in his ninetieth year (1732). More to our taste are the carved stalls that were set up in this period in Notrc-Dame-de-Paris.

  Tapestry was now specifically a royal art. Not content with bringing the Gobelin and Aubusson factories under the King’s control, Colbert persuaded him also to take over the tapissiers of Beauvais. Tapestries were still the favored decoration for the walls and screens of palaces and châteaux, for pageants, tournaments, state ceremonies, and religious festivals. At Beauvais the Flemish painter Adam van der Meulen designed an outstanding series, The Conquests of Louis the Great, for which the artist prepared himself by following the King to the wars, and drawing or painting on the spot the sites, forts, and villages involved in the campaigns. The Gobelin factory employed eight hundred artisans, who made not only tapestry but fine textiles, woodwork, silverwork, mctalwork, and marble marquetry. There, under Le Brun’s direction, were woven the great tapestries from the cartoons of Raphael’s massive frescoes in the Stanze of the Vatican. Hardly less renowned were the several series designed by Le Brun himself: The Elements, The Seasons, The History of Alexander, The Royal Residences, and The History of the King. The last group ran to seventeen pieces and took ten years of labor. A superb specimen still hangs in the Gobelin exhibition rooms—the figures astonishingly individualized, the details fully visualized, even to the landscape picture on the wall; all in colored threads patiently woven by subtle hands under tired eyes. Rarely has so much human industry been devoted to the adulation of one man. Louis excused himself by explaining to Colbert that these apotheoses gave employment and income to dyers and weavers, and served as impressive gifts in the lubrication of diplomacy.

  Under the lavish royal hand all the minor arts rejoiced. Splendid carpets were made at La Savonnerie near Paris. Fine faïence was produced at R
ouen and Moustiers, good majolica at Nevers, soft-paste porcelain at Rouen and St.-Cloud. Toward the end of the seventeenth century French craftsmen, prodded by Colbert, learned the Venetian secrets of casting, rolling, and polishing plate glass; so were made the vast and brilliant mirrors of the Galerie des Glaces. 12 Goldsmiths like Julien Defontaine and Vincent Petit were organized by Colbert and Le Brun, were given lodgings in the Louvre, and made for the King and the rich a thousand articles in silver or gold—until Louis and the grandees melted down these ornaments to finance war. Jewels, medals, coins were cut and engraved in designs that set the pace for all Europe but Italy. Not since the Renaissance had the art of the medallion reached such excellence as came now with Antoine Benoist and Jean Mauger. Leaving no stone uncarved, Colbert founded in 1662 the Academy of Medals and Inscriptions, “in order to render the acts of the King immortal by . . . medals struck in his honor” 13—which was the great minister’s way of enlisting moneyed vanity behind expensive art. In 1667 the École de Gravures was established in the Louvre; and the burins of Robert Nanteuil, Sébastien Le Clerc, Robert Bonnart, and Jean Lepautre illustrated with meticulous refinement the personalities and events of the reign. Even miniature painting survived, though fallen from its medieval estate, in the Livre d’heures presented to the King by his pensioners in the Invalides. It is the minor arts, above all the rest, that display the taste and craftsmanship of the great century.

  IV. PAINTING

  Two pictorial stars of the second magnitude fall into the outer orbit of this age: Philippe de Champaigne and Eustache Le Sueur. Philippe came from Brussels at the age of nineteen (1621), shared in decorating the Palais du Luxembourg, and made not only the full-length Richelieu in the Louvre, but the bust and profiles of the Cardinal in the London National Gallery. His sympathetic flair as a portrait painter brought him as sitters half the leaders of France in the generation that succeeded Richelieu: Mazarin, Turenne, Colbert, Lemercier . . . He had already, before coming to France, portrayed Jansen and accepted Jansenism; he loved Port-Royal, and made portraits of Mère Angélique, Robert Arnauld, and Saint-Cyran. For Port-Royal he painted his greatest picture, Les Religieuses (Louvre)—Mère Agnès, somber yet sweet, with the artist’s nun daughter Suzanne. Champaigne’s range was limited, but his art comes warmly to us with its feeling and sincerity.

  A kindred but more orthodox piety made Eustache Le Sueur uncomfortable in an age whose painting was dominated by his rival Le Brun and by a pagan mythology dedicated to the deification of a not-yet-pious King. The two artists studied together under Vouet, worked together in the same cellar, used the same model, and were alike praised by Poussin on his visit to Paris. Le Brun followed Poussin to Rome and imbibed the classical spirit; Le Sueur tied himself to Paris with a fertile wife, and seldom escaped from poverty. About 1644 he painted five pictures, describing events in the life of Eros, for the ceiling of the Cabinet de l’Amour in the palace of his patron Lambert de Thorigny; and in another room of this Hôtel Lambert he executed a major fresco, Phaeton Asks to Guide the Chariot of the Sun. In 1645 Le Sueur stumbled into a duel, killed his man, hid himself in a Carthusian monastery, and there painted twenty-two pictures from the life of St. Bruno, founder of the Carthusian order; in these the artist reached his apogee. In 1776 the series was bought from the Carthusian monks for 132,000 livres; today they occupy a special room in the Louvre. When Le Brun returned from Italy (1647) he carried everything before him, and Le Sueur fell back into poverty. He died in 1655, only thirty-eight years old.

  Charles Le Brun ruled the arts in Paris and Versailles, because he had the ability to co-ordinate and direct as well as to conceive and execute. Son of a sculptor who had painter friends, he grew up in an environment where he learned to draw as other children learn to write. At fifteen, with a neversleeping eye to the main chance, he painted an allegory of Richelieu’s life and success; the minister leaped to the bait, and commissioned him to paint some mythological subjects for the Palais-Cardinal. Taken to Rome by Poussin, he steeped himself in the mythologies and decorations of Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Pietro da Cortona. When he reappeared in Paris his style of luscious ornamentation was fully developed. Here again Fouquet gave Louis a lead by engaging Le Brun for the palace at Vaux. The brilliance of the resulting frescoes, the voluptuous grace of the female figures, the rich detail in cornices and moldings appealed to Mazarin, Colbert, and the King. By 1660 Le Brun was painting frescoes from the career of Alexander for the royal palace at Fontainebleau. Louis, pleased to recognize his own features under Alexander’s helmet, came daily to watch the artist at work on The Battle of Arbela and The Family of Darius at the Feet of Alexander—both now in the Louvre. The King rewarded him with a royal portrait inset with diamonds, made him his premier peintre, and gave him a pension of twelve thousand livres a year.

  Le Brun did not slacken his industry. In 1661 fire ruined the central gallery of the Louvre. Le Brun designed the restoration, and painted the ceiling and cornices with scenes from the legends of Apollo; hence the name Galerie d’Apollon. Meanwhile the ambitious artist studied architecture, sculpture, metalwork, woodwork, tapestry design, and the diverse arts that were now conscripted to adorn the palaces of the great. All these arts were fused in his varied skills, so that he seemed made by fortune to bring the artists of France into unified action to produce le style Louis Quatorze.

  Even before appointing him director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Louis gave him a free hand and purse to decorate Versailles. There he labored for seventeen years (1664–81), co-ordinating the art work, designing the Ambassador’s Staircase, and himself painting, in the Halls of War and Peace, and in the Grand Gallery, twenty-seven frescoes describing the glories of the King from the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) to the Treaty of Nijmegen (1679). Amid a profusion of gods and goddesses, clouds and rivers, horses and chariots, he showed Louis in war and peace: hurling thunderbolts, crossing the Rhine, besieging Ghent, but also administering justice and finance, feeding the poor in famine, establishing hospitals, nourishing art. Individually these pictures are not masterpieces; the classical basis is overgrown with baroque profusion of ornament; but taken together they constitute the most brilliant work done by French painters in this age. The exaltation of the King offends us as revealing in him a hybris of pride, but such adulation of princes was in the manner of the time. No wonder Louis, seeing some paintings by Le Brun near others by Veronese and Poussin, said to his painter, “Your works sustain themselves well among those of the great masters; they require only the death of their author to make them more valued. But we hope they will not soon have that advantage.” 14 Through all the jealousies with which Le Brun was soon surrounded, the King supported him, as he was supporting the harassed Molière. It was characteristic of Louis that when he was in administrative conference and word was brought to him that Le Brun had come to show him his latest work, The Elevation of the Cross, 15 he excused himself from the conference to go and examine the painting and express his pleasure; then he invited all the conferees to come and join him in viewing the picture. 16 So, in this reign, government and art went hand in hand, and artists shared rewards and plaudits with generals.

  Le Brun’s artistry, though it stemmed from Italian decoration, was something new; it was a decorative composition in which a dozen arts were brought together to make one aesthetic whole. When he tried his hand at individual canvases he slipped into mediocrity. As the King’s victories turned into defeats, and his mistresses gave way to priests, the mood of the reign changed, and the gay ornaments of Le Brun fell out of place. When Louvois succeeded Colbert as superintendent of buildings, Le Brun lost his role as master of the arts, though he remained president of the Academy. He died in 1690, a symbol of glory finished and gone.

  Many artists rejoiced to be freed from his authority. Pierre Mignard in particular had resented that domination. Nine years older than Le Brun, he had preceded him as a pilgrim coming with palette to Rome; like Poussin, he so loved the Eternal City that he dec
ided to live there the rest of his life, and he did remain there for twenty-two years (1635–57). His portraits so pleased their sitters that at last Pope Innocent X, who may have resented the face that Velazquez had given him, sat for Mignard, who interpreted him more amiably. In 1646, aged thirty-four, Mignard married an Italian beauty; but he had barely settled down to legitimate parentage when he received a summons from France to come and serve his King. He went reluctantly. In Paris he rebelled against accepting directions from Le Brun, refused to join the Academy, and fretted to see the younger man reaping ribbons and gold. Molière recommended him to Colbert, but the minister was probably right in preferring Le Brun; Mignard would not rise to the grandiose scale that the grand siècle required. However, Louis, then twenty, wanted a fetching portrait of himself with which to lure a bride from Spain. Mignard obliged, Louis and María Teresa were charmed, and Mignard became the most successful portrait painter of the age. One after another he pictured his contemporaries: Mazarin, Colbert, de Retz, Descartes, La Fontaine, Molière, Racine, Bossuet, Turenne, Ninon de Lenclos, Louise de La Vallière, Mmes. de Montespan, de Maintenon, de La Fayette, de Sévigné; and he did justice to Anne of Austria’s hands, which were considered the most beautiful in the world. She rewarded him with a commission to decorate the vault of the dome in the Church of Val-de-Grâce; this fresco was his masterpiece, which Molière celebrated in a poem. He painted the King many times, most famously in the equestrian portrait at Versailles, but we find him there at his best in the lovely portrait of the Duchess of Maine as a Child. After Colbert’s death Mignard at last triumphed over Le Brun; he succeeded his rival as court painter in 1690, and was made a member of the Academy by royal decree. Five years later, still painting and fighting, he died, aged eighty-five.