The Face of the Monarchy: Court Propaganda and the Portrait Bust
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Chapter 5 The Face of the Monarchy: Court Propaganda and the Portrait Bust The father and the king are, the one and the other, living images of God whose empire is founded on love. Nature has made fathers for the advan- tage of children. Society has made kings for the happiness of the people.1 In the preceding chapter, I examined the crisis of masculinity in eighteenth- century art and culture and the related erosion of patriarchal authority, as delineated in the portrait bust. Considering the French king’s traditional and historical status as ‘the father of the French people,’ a treatment of this crisis cannot be complete without an examination of the monarchical image dur- ing this period. In the second chapter, I discussed an official bust of Queen Marie-Antoinette, showing how the ideal of maternal pleasure had perme- ated the royal court and transformed the representation of the royal family: Marie-Antoinette’s portraits were softer and more humane than those of her predecessors, while embodying the new dual ideal of eroticism and mother- hood. Could the male ruler of France’s unstable absolute monarchy similarly present himself in accordance with the new perception of masculinity, which embraced an ethos of good fatherhood while pointing to a crisis of paternal authority? This chapter aims to examine the transformation of the image of the French king under the ancien régime, beginning with the reign of Louis XIV—the epit- ome of absolute monarchy—and ending with the reign of Louis XVI and the fall of the House of Bourbon. I will analyze several portrait busts of French sovereigns, including Louis XIV’s most famous portrait, which was created by Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, Louis XV’s official portrait by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, and two contrasting representations of Louis XVI by Louis-Pierre Deseine and Jean-Antoine Houdon. The dialectic relations between the public and private spheres, which are central to Enlightenment culture, will be further elabo- rated upon through an analysis of porcelain busts of Louis XV and Louis XVI, which were created as public images to be exhibited in the private domain. 1 Unknown author, “Paternal Love,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. For the French, see “Amour paternel,” in Encyclopédie, eds. Diderot & d’Alembert, 1:370. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�76�53_007 the face of the monarchy 155 In doing so, I examine whether the French monarchy had embraced the sub- versive public view of the king as an individual person rather than as a divine entity, and probe how images of the monarch negotiated the new ambivalence characteristic of masculine imagery and the related crisis of paternal authority while avoiding representations that would further weaken the monarchy. Born in 1638, Louis XIV, known as Louis the Great or the Sun King, ruled as King of France and Navarre from 1643 until his death in 1715. He was the longest-reigning king in European history, ruling for over seventy-two years. Louis XIV effectively assumed power in 1661, after the death of his chief minis- ter, Cardinal Mazarin. He was an adherent of the theory of the divine right of kings, which upheld the divine origin of a monarchial rule limited by no tem- poral restraints. Louis XIV followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, who had embarked on the creation of a centralized state governed from the capital while working to eliminate the remnants of feudalism that persisted in parts of France. By compelling a significant part of the noble elite to inhabit his lavish palace in Versailles, he succeeded in pacifying the French aristocracy, which was constrained to give up a large amount of power and financial income due to the court’s strategies of centralization.2 These strategies supported a system of absolute monarchical rule that endured until the outbreak of the French Revolution. During the reign of Louis XIV, France was the leading European power: Louis XIV encouraged, and benefited from, the work of prominent polit- ical, military, and cultural figures such as the politicians Mazarin and Colbert, the French marshals Turenne and Vauban, the writers Molière, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine, the composer Lully, the artists Le Brun and Rigaud, the theo- logians Bossuet and Fénelon, and the architects Le Vau, Mansart, Perrault, and Le Nôtre.3 One of the most celebrated sculptural images of Louis XIV, which came to serve as an artistic model, was executed by Gian-Lorenzo Bernini in 1665 (fig. 52).4 In 1665, the esteemed Italian sculptor accepted the Sun King’s invita- tion to come to France and work on a new project for the royal residence at the Louvre. Following his arrival in Paris, Bernini was officially commissioned to 2 William Beik, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past & Present 188 (2005): 195–224. 3 On various aspects of culture as promoted by Louis XIV, see David Lee Rubin, ed., Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture during the Reign of Louis XIV (Washington, 1992). 4 The bibliography on this bust is very extensive. The most complete study of the bust is still: Rudolph Wittkower, Bernini’s bust of Louis XIV (London, 1951). See also Bacchi, Hess, and Montagu, Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, 266–269, although referring to the bronze cast in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC..