Costumes for Universal Harmony in Louis XIII's Court Ballets by Franklin
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Costumes for Universal Harmony in Louis XIII's Court Ballets by Franklin Brooks In 1985 a cache of 188 early seventeenth-century French costume drawings came to light in Switzerland and quickly made its way onto the art market, so quickly in fact that no French institution could move fast enough to purchase even one.1 The Victoria and Albert's Theatre Museum got a lion's share and collaborated with the London art dealers, Hobhouse Limited and Morton-Morris and Company Limited, to publish all of them in an album, The Court Ballet of Louis XIII (1986), for which Professor Margaret McGowan of Sussex University wrote the introduction and presumably the notes. Her unequaled knowledge of these ballets allowed her to assign almost all of these drawings to some twenty ballets of the period from 1615-1633.2 The images provide exceptional evidence about how Louis XIII's favorite spectacles looked and their portrayal of carnival misrule and the burlesque extravagances of a topsy-turvy world surpasses the ingenuity of all others of the period. Journalists covering a New York City exhibit of these drawings stressed such themes above all, echoing McGowan's claim that from 1620 until 1643. the grotesque ballet was preeminent in France, in contrast with other European courts. (Kisselgoff: "Early Court Ballet" 9; 39-48) At the same time the drawings also feature Louis and Anne of Austria dancing noble roles (figures 93 and 119, acquired by the New York Public Library) in triumphs of royal majesty reminiscent of Stuart masques. I propose to examine pictorial evidence here of these burlesque and noble treatments of music and dance, treatments ridiculing and celebrating the highest accomplishments of harmony. These subjects are essential to an understanding of five ballets in particular: Tancrede (1619), Apollon (1621), Les Fees 188 FRANKLIN BROOKS de la Forgt de Saint-Germain (1625), Le Serieux et le Grotesque (1627), and Le Ballet de I'Harmonie (1632).3 These working drawings carry marginal notes, naming a dancer, specifying a color or fabric, explaining a trick of construction, or explaining modifications for later use. They bring us uncannily close to the performers as they stepped on stage in these miracles of painting, architecture, fire works, stage machinery, lyric poetry, vocal and instrumental music, and dance. In particular they document the accomplishments of dancers and musicians, professionals and noble amateurs. Some sketches picture the masks they wore; others capture real gestures and steps; fancy footwork necessitated these trunk hose and short skirts. Here violinists and oboe players, who accompanied the dances, wear their stage costumes; dancers, who sang as well, accompany themselves on lutes, guitars, and lyres. Other instruments may have been played or only carried as accessories: hunting horns, bugles, trumpets, flutes, oboes, and bagpipes, percussion and tambourines. Turning these pages, one wants to apply Leo Spitzer's definition of seventeenth-century opera to court ballet: "a theatrical and musical genre devoted to the glorification of music—indeed, the self-glorification of music—on the stage of the theater." (Spitzer 121) These theatrical events were political and social episodes in the life of the court and its cycles of weddings and merry-making; they also illustrate the fluctuating fortunes of its policies and personalities. Yet here we are reminded that Louis's times interpreted these contigencies of life in terms of world harmony and the divinely ordered music of the spheres.4 McGowan assigns these unsigned drawings to "the atelier of Daniel Rabel," although we do not know for sure that Rabel was enlisted to work on all of them (1986, p. [1]). We do know that he was the foremost ballet costume designer of his generation. What remains to be studied—and these drawings compel us to do it—is his theater work in the context of his career as a prominent, well-connected portrait painter, engraver, COSTUMES FOR UNIVERSAL HARMONY... 189 miniaturist, and book illustrator. The son of Jean Rabel, a painter and illustrator, Daniel was born around 1578. His specialties were book illustration, both engravings and illuminations, and portraits, in miniatures and gouaches.5 He painted Louis XIII's twice, and young Anne of Austria's before she came to France. In 1624 he produced an album of one hundred miniatures of flowers and insects on vellum in which Malherbe wrote a sonnet. (Oeuvres Poetiques 217-218) 6 He published a volume of his own garden designs, Livre de differents desseigns de parterres, and illustrated Ovid's Metamorphoses, d'Urfe's L'Astree in the 1627-28 edition, Les Amours de Theagene et Chariclee, and travel books by des Hayes de Courmin and de Feynes. Peiresc employed him to copy illustrations from medieval manuscripts about chivalric orders in 1622 and again in 1632. {Lettres, VII 339, 812) In the 1660s Marolles did not hesitate to rank the father and son with Jacques Stella, Laurent de La Hyre,. and Eustache Le Sueur,and he put Daniel's crayons in a class with those of Pourbus, Freminet, Vignon, and Callot (18).7 Daniel's training as an illustrator may explain the powerful beauty of the present drawings. Some are more impressive than Inigo Jones's. In the field of court ballet his earliest known activity is his engravings for the souvenir book of the Ballet de Renaud (1617); the costume in figure 6 in the 1986 album comes from one of these (McGowan, 1983, plate XIII). This ballet foretold the fall of' the Marechal d'Ancre and the rise of the due de Luynes. The first mention of his own costume designs is a payment of 100 livres for the Ballet de Tancrede (1619). In 1625 his "portraits et dessins" for the Ballet des Fees de la Forit de Saint-Germain earned him 150 •livres ("Manuscrit de l'extraordinaire de l'argenterie pour l'annee 1625." In McGowan 139). That phrase is taken to mean the costumes themselves but the water color drawings of the performers that he made afterwards are what make his name famous today. The following year he made another set to commemorate the Grand Bal de la Douairiere de Billebahaut and in 1632 a third set to record the Ballet du Chateau de Bissestre (McGowan, 1963, p. [347]). All three are 190 FRANKLIN BROOKS now in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Louvre, bound in a single volume, catalogued as Nos 32.602-32.693. Rabel's present drawings are all the more remarkable because according to McGowan they are the original sketches from which he made the Louvre's copies (McGowan, 1986, p. [5]). No fewer than forty-two drawings from the German volume are related to them! Apart from these facts nothing is known about Rabel's contribution to the art of court ballet or his private life, except that his widow married the composer Jacques de Montmorency, Sieur de Belleville, in 1637. Belleville probably composed the music for the Ballet des Fees and worked with Rabel on others. Rabel also worked with the composers Antoine Boesset, Jacques Cordier, and Louis Constantin. They may have suggested ways to use musical instruments in these costumes although the comic incongruities also owe much to Jacques Callot's hellish inventions, in the tradition of Hieronymus Bosch. "Faire voir une musique"—Colletet's description of dance in the preface to his Ballet de VHarmonie (1632) might apply to these drawings as well. Colletet's text provides a useful summary of his generation's interpretation of the ancient tradition concerning harmony.8 At the center of his analysis is God and the attributes "la divine bonte" (208), "la souveraine beaute" (209), and harmony. What constitutes goodness and beauty and harmony is left unstated, although we infer that it concerns numbers, proportion, regularity, perfection, the balance between unity and diversity, and order. No matter, for God is "celuy dont (Fhomme) est 1'image" (210), and harmony is "le principe plus interieur de nostre essence" as well as God's (209). We can recognize harmony, whether we understand it or not. An encounter with harmony is a reunion of human nature and the divine, a transitory return to our "felicite naturelle" (209). The pleasure and charm that the human soul feels in such encounters are a quickening of its energy, a sign of well-being, even in the presence of something less than the divine, e.g. "le plaisir des belles choses," for instance (209). Colletet's ballet presents some of the most likely ways COSTUMES FOR UNIVERSAL HARMONY... 191 that divine goodness communicates the well-being of harmony. Strange to say, it is difficult to be sure about what actions Harmony herself performed; it is a non-speaking role and the description only refers to her when she leaves the stage twice (episodes XIII and XVII). The album shows her and an attendant muse (figures 148 and 149). Episode XVII seems to be her apotheosis: "Alors on verra s'ouvrir le throsne de PHarmonie, d'ou il sortira un melodieux concert de voix et de luths, c'est-a-dire PHarmonie parfaicte remise en sa place" (219). I visualize this moment as the revelation of her throne-room from which singers and luth-players emerge onto the stage, perhaps dancing. In this ballet, as elsewhere, Harmony remains primarily identified with music—Orpheus' six nymphs represent the hexachord in episode V—whatever other areas of life she controls. In Colletet's introduction we learn that human sight, as well as hearing, can perceive harmony since inanimate matter and the human body alike respond to harmony with movement. Dance is "une musique pour les yeux" (208).