Imaginary Palaces and Garden Theatres - the illusions of despotism

Palladio's interior of Teatro Olimpico, 1580-83, with Scamozzi's fixed illusionist set receding into the distance beyond. [Photo source: Web Gallery of Art]

 Theatres were built to look like palaces, and palaces looked like theatres....

Acting the King: Illusions of Baroque Power

 The Apollo Grotto at Versailles, by Girardon, representing Lous XIV as Apollo attended by nymphs of the court. Photo source: Web Gallery of Art

The risk that the absolutist and would-be absolutist princes of 17th Europe took in seizing the theatrical, passionate style of Baroque Art for their propaganda purposes was that, for all the flattering idealization, the classical allusions and type-casting, it was more personal, far, far more personal, than court portraiture had ever been before, the skill of artists giving deeper psychological insight into their private characters and inviting as much scrutiny as admiration. Elizabeth I was being as wise as she was vain when she insisted on being painted without shadows. 

Punishment

While love bears its own punishment,
tearing at its open wound,

the State ‎covets all, taxing loss as profit.

Unkindness of ravens
tears at scraps, steals all that shines.

I am the guardian of a desecrated shrine.
In the violence of her absence,
I have lost all bearings but one:
I know my duty
to get up each day
to execute.

Documents to sign,
forms to fill, fees to pay,
our home to sell,
detritus of three lives, (his, hers, mine)
to throw away.

Grief bears guilt already:
wronged and ashamed,
night-time beatings of self-reproach
overheard -

there they are again, the rats rustling in the hedge -

remembrance should be sweet poetic distillation,
not polemic spleen.
Already I'm at war and not believed:
it’s heresy to say a hospice is cruel.

Fiscal sideshow bob twists the knife:
London postcode alerted Exchequer
to seize poor widow’s mite,
disallow orphan’s contributions
to mouse-hole not entered in a rent book;
a one-bed flat and two lives mortgaged
must now be given up.

The feudal lord reclaims his fief:
he envies her castles in the air,
lovelier than all his banks and revenues.

I must put a value
on her death-bed,
on books and pictures,
jewellery and clothes
that I had given her,
love markers
of birthdays and feastdays,
now easy pickings for the State,
rolling her up at her end of days.

“Be grateful for our bureaucratic system
giving you tasks to distract you from grief" -
pharoahs would have laid a curse
on modern, prating, white-collar thieves.

Papers heap on the floor -
"make piles" probate officer said.
Kneeling over them,
wailing
at signs impenetrable
as petroglyphs on sarcophagus -
I'll pay the price later
for not "carrying over" -
I am bereft and punished for it.

Leftover
only daughter - 
how did love bear so sad a child?
and executor,

crouched in the paper pocked cell
that had been her home
and should have been her shrine,

harried and reviled

by the neighbours,
"Mad bitch mad bitch

Whose laughter turns to crying",

I wait to be
executed, too.

Part Three

REBEGOT

Stage-struck

The Queen's Theatre at le Petit Trianon. Photo source: chateau de versailles website 

Marie-Antoinette, derided for abusing her official role by spending hours playing at being a shepherdess, was a dutiful and instinctively discerning patroness of the arts - she genuinely enjoyed the opera of Gluck, Salieri, Piccini and Sacchini and appreciated Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro, immensely popular among the ruling classes who were titillated by a satire against themselves, despite the government's attempts to have it banned.

She selected the play's more innocent predecessor, Le Barbier de Seville, for performance in her private theatre at Versailles, playing the part of Rosine, the future tragic Countess Almaviva. Like other actresses, she knew a good part when she read it, even though she was far too old for it, and wasn't going to turn it down for a petty political reason.

Once she was lit on stage, the actress felt she was in a different, brighter, hotter country. There she could enjoy the illusion of absolute power, in the touching belief that for as long as she appeared to laugh at herself she was immune to attack.

Her Petit Théâtre was a pretty confection in blue and gold, its tiny auditorium decorated with a painted ceiling and gilded sculpture, an architectural illusion made of wood and papier-mâché, built in the grounds of le Petit Trianon which, with its model village and dairy, was the stage-set for the queen's fantasies turning inward, while the public image and real power of the monarchy was disintegrating.

Transport

Apollo's Chariot

Cupid's Coach

These Victorian brooch motifs are reproduced in modern home and clothing design products available for sale on Zazzle

Tenth Night of Christmas: Blog Launch