Enchanted Islands

PART THREE of THEATRES OF POWER

 

As proof that Louis XIV’s power was absolute, Nature itself was subservient to him in the water gardens of Versailles. The fountain jets of le bosquet du théâtre d’eau (replaced in the early 1770s by a plain grass covered grove, and recently excavated) were designed, according to the fontaineer Claude Denis, to perform “obeisance to the king of kings”.

 Le théâtre d’eau - vue de la scène, 

one of the views of les bosquets, or groves, of Versailles by Jean Cotelle the younger, 1693. 

Image source: Wikipedia

For over a hundred years, the official pretexts for the exquisite staged illusions in the chateau's grounds were usually celebrations of royal weddings and new-born heirs, as you would expect of a fairy tale, but also, on occasion, the birth of a son to the king's favourite mistress of the moment, and the acquisition of territories through war, ruinously expensive in money and lives. "I have loved war too much", confessed the dying king, forty years later, when he bequeathed toxic, bankrupt splendour to his five year old heir. 

Feu d'artifice: Firework display on the canal at Versailles, one of the divertissements held at Versailles to celebrate the reconquest of Franche-Comté in 1674. On previous days of the festival, Lully's ballet Alceste had been performed in front of the Marble Court and Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire in front of the Grotto of Thetis. Engraving by Le Pautre, 1676. 

Image © RMN, Musée du Louvre/Photo Thierry de Mage

Advanced technology and artistic talent mythologized life at court, enabling the refulgent monarchy to divert the nobility into acquiescence during peacetime, and dazzle friends and enemies abroad, with ballets, plays, operas, tricks of the eye, dancing fountains, musical gardens and artificial fire. The population excluded from wealth and political power, the artisans and peasants, were invited to marvel at the pleasures of the elite from a safe distance, on the terrace behind the palace or in the branches of the garden trees.

Louis XIV had always intended Versailles should be a theatre...

The ministry of fashion

"Golden lads and girls....must come to dust."

Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart

Van Dyck, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Image source: WGA

Collateral damage of baroque absolutist illusion.

They were wrong but romantic; collateral damage of absolutism and revolution, teenage brothers, cousins of the king, transformed and immortalized by Van Dyck into an illusory image of English aristocracy that inspired fantasies still enjoyed today, including fictional upper-class heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel and the 1930s gentleman detective, whose outward foppishness concealed brains and virility, and, more recently, re-invented as the modern meterosexual vampires of film and TV, whose lineage goes back beyond late Victorian Dracula, to Byronic heroes, Restoration libertines and doomed Cavalier youths.

The confident, sensual magnificence of Baroque male fashion boasted feminine attributes; in comparison, the presentation of ideal masculine sexuality of a hundred years earlier - Henry VIII in his straddling stance jutting out his codpiece - looks crudely insecure. 

Even a realistic artist and social observer like Frans

Theatres of Power

PART TWO

 It was not the artist's fault that the real king rode into the picture of himself and never came out.

 

Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Van Dyck, 1633, Royal Collection. 

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Baroque imagery, even when superbly executed by artistic geniuses, did not always succeed as political message in the patron's favour or keep the King or Queen's head on during a revolution, but it still works as art. Over three and a half centuries later, the first impression of Charles I that grabs most of us is Van Dyck's interpretation of a refined and chivalric paternalistic figure, not "that man of blood", the "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good of this nation" called to account for all the lives that had been lost in civil war.

 

Van Dyck's portraits, etherealising Charles I and his court, are as much of a theatrical device as Inigo Jones' fantastical masque designs, creating an ineradicable illusion of aristocratic grace and virtue in parallel with the historic reality of an unpopular and flawed regime. It was not the artist's fault that the real king walked into the picture and never came out. A sophisticated public relations initiative presented Stuart hereditary monarchy as an ideal nuclear family, affectionate and impeccably dressed, complete with pet dog and aspirational home.....

The tyranny of fantasy

THEATRES OF POWER 1580-1780
Part One

You climbed the stairs to see the interior of an opulent palace, where you half expected to find Sleeping Beauty, reminding you of the toy theatre you played with when you were a child, its painted flats arranged layer behind layer giving you the illusion of depth and space, over which you had dominion, one of your first tastes of the enchantment of power.

Giuseppi Valeriani: Set of designs for a stage set, 17th Century. 

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London 

This pretty and delicate model was designed in the early eighteenth century as a seven piece set by the Italian Russian artist Giuseppe Valeriani with pen and brown ink, watercolour and judicious use of gold leaf on paper.

It was the starting point of the exhibition Stages and Scenes: Creating Architectural Illusion at the Courtauld Gallery in 2008. The eight students on the Curating the Art Museum MA programme chose the piece before they had decided on a theme for their exhibition. Like a true fairy tale talisman, the object had powers of suggestion to open a door....

Broken hopes

Hafen Hamburg Eis by Martin Hübscher © 2010

reblogged with kind permission from Martin Hübscher Photography