The pursuit of glory, p.56
The Pursuit of Glory, page 56
Life therefore at Versailles was gilded, but was it a gilded cage? Although it was undoubtedly an exercise in political and social control, this familiar image of an emasculated aristocracy pining in luxurious but enervating captivity is misleading. As the exponents of the ‘new court history’ have pointed out, not even the court of Louis XIV was a monolith but rather a coalition. To use John Adamson’s appropriate metaphor: ‘The courtier’s firmament contained a constellation, not a single blazing sun.’ Overemphasis on the concept of ‘state-building’ has obscured the extent to which the court allowed sovereign and courtiers to renegotiate their relationship in a spirit of co-operation, with the former making as many sacrifices as the latter: ‘Far from being the cause of the nobles’ ensnarement, as was once supposed, service at court generally appears to have been one of the principal means by which aristocratic authority and influence were maintained’ (Adamson). Albeit on Louis XIV’s terms, one might add.
One characteristic of Versailles that distinguished it from the other palaces considered so far was the national origin of the various artists involved. Virtually all were French. The exception that proves the rule was the music supremo, Jean-Baptiste Lully. Although the creator of French lyric tragedy, he was a Florentine by birth and was known as Giovanni Battista Lulli until he gallicized his name and set the seal on his formal naturalization by marrying the daughter of another senior member of the French musical establishment. Thus he managed to meet the maxim of the librettist Pierre Perrin (1620–75) that ‘the glory of the King and of France make it unseemly that a nation otherwise invincible should be ruled by foreigners in matters pertaining to the fine arts, poetry and music’. This observation about the national exclusiveness of Versailles is less trite than it might sound, for it was unusual. Of the palaces considered in this chapter, Mafra was the creation of the architect Johann Friedrich Ludwig from Schwäbisch Hall in south-western Germany and an army of Italian sculptors; La Granja was designed by Teodore Ardemans, another German by birth, and its gardens by the Frenchman Étienne Boutelou; the new royal palace at Madrid was the work of Giovanni Battista Sacchetti from Turin; the chief architect of Klosterneuburg was another Italian, Donato Felice Allio; and so on.
With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that it was the visit of Bernini to Paris in 1665 that marked a watershed. Regarded by contemporaries as the successor of Michelangelo, he was invited to take charge of a fundamental reconstruction of the Louvre, the main royal palace in the capital. His reputation was such that the journey from Rome took on the character of a triumphal progress. Louis XIV had ordered that nothing be spared to give an appropriate welcome to the ‘King of Art’ and sent the head of his household to greet him. The latter, Paul Fréart de Chantelou, kept a daily diary of Bernini’s five-month sojourn, so a great deal is known about it and why it ended in failure. Bernini’s plans were not adopted and only the east front of the Louvre was completed, to designs by the French architect Claude Perrault. The only lasting memorial of the visit was Bernini’s magnificent bust of Louis XIV, ‘the most compelling record of absolutism in the visual arts’ (Francis Haskell). The project foundered partly because of the personal antipathy displayed by Colbert, in effect chief minister for all domestic matters (‘a right c—’ was Bernini’s terse verdict); partly because of the enormous expense and disruption the plans would have entailed; partly because the King was losing interest in Paris and looking to Versailles; and partly because Bernini’s taste was just too Italian. This is revealed by a comparison of his design with what Perrault eventually built. Not for nothing did Perrault produce an edition of Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the only text on architectural theory and practice to have survived from classical antiquity. Moreover, he intended this not as an antiquarian exercise but as a polemical work, to guide present-day architects. The noble simplicity and calm grandeur of his Louvre colonnade is a world, or at least a mountain-range, away from the rhythmic interplay of concave and convex of Bernini’s design. As David Watkin has written about Perrault’s achievement: ‘classical yet modern, rational yet grandiose, French yet universal in its air of authority and detachment, it is the perfect example of the classical baroque style of seventeenth-century France’.
That oxymoronic pairing of apparent opposites could be applied to the rest of Louis XIV’s cultural project, exemplified by Versailles. Its authority was underpinned by the creation of a series of royal institutions to codify its practice. The Académie française (1634) was later joined by Academies for Painting and Sculpture (1648), Dance (1661), Inscriptions and Letters (1661), Sciences (1666), Music (1669) and Architecture (1671). By that time, there was no branch of high culture not subject to state control. It was also extended to the fledgling press. In 1663, the historian Eudes de Mézeray was granted permission to publish a literary journal on the dual grounds that the arts and the sciences enhanced a state’s prestige no less than feats of arms, and that French intellect was in no way inferior to French valour. But although de Mézeray was authorized to report on innovations in every branch of culture, he was strictly forbidden to venture any opinion on matters of morality, religion or politics. The monopoly enforced by the academies ensured that any ambitious and talented artist was obliged to accept state service. Given the scale of Louis XIV’s patronage at Versailles and elsewhere, there was also a strong financial incentive to enter the gilded cage. Consequently, almost all the great names of the age–Corneille, Racine, Molière, Lully, Delalande, Couperin, Le Vau, Mansart, de Cotte, Le Nôtre, Lebrun, Mignard, Rigaud, Largillierre, Girardon, Coysevox–enjoyed an intimate relationship with the state through pensions or appointments. Their loyalty was total. One example must suffice, namely Racine’s fawning declaration that ‘all the words of the language, all the syllables seem precious to us, because we look on them as so many instruments which must serve the glory of our August Protector’.
In short, Versailles was only the most spectacular manifestation of a much wider cultural project which aimed at nothing less than the hegemony of French culture in Europe. By the time Louis XIV moved his court officially to Versailles in 1682, there was growing evidence of success. In the same year Ménestrier could claim that the cultural hegemony of Italy was over: ‘It is the glory of France to have succeeded in establishing the rules for all the fine arts. During the past twenty years, scholarly dissertations have regulated drama, epic poetry, epigrams, eclogues, painting, music, architecture, heraldry, mottoes, riddles, emblems, history and rhetoric. All branches of knowledge are now conducted in our language’.
Of all these emblems, it was language that was the most important. In 1685 Pierre Bayle observed from his Dutch exile: ‘in future it will be the French language which will serve as the means of communication for all the peoples of Europe’, adding that every educated person wanted to acquire what had become a mark of good breeding. His forecast was confirmed in 1694 by the official journal, the Mercure Galante: ‘The range of the French language has crossed the kingdom’s frontiers. It is confined neither by the Pyrenees, nor by the Alps nor by the Rhine. French is to be heard all over Europe. The French language is spoken at all the courts: the princes and the grandees speak it, the ambassadors write it and high society makes it fashionable.’ When Louis came to the throne in 1643, French was only one of several competing languages: either Spanish or Italian could have made as good if not a better claim to be the lingua franca of educated Europe, while Latin still dominated academic discourse. Halfway through his reign it could be claimed by Father Dominique Bouhours SJ that French had become the world-language, ‘as current among the savages of America as it is among the most civilized nations of Europe’. By the end of the seventeenth century, the marquis de Dangeau could tell the Académie française with majestic complacency: ‘All our works contribute to the embellishment of our language and help to make it known to foreigners. The wonders achieved by the King have made French as familiar to our neighbours as their own vernacular, indeed the events of these past few years have broadcast it over all the oceans of the globe, making it as essential to the New World as to the Old.’ It was a process assisted by the codification of the French language in the great dictionary of the Académie française, completed in 1694.
No great acumen is needed to spot that all these tributes to the hegemony of French culture were written by Frenchmen. But there are other, more objective indications that they had a good case. The first international treaty to be drafted in French rather than Latin was the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713; by the 1770s, even treaties not involving France were being drafted in her language, such as the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainarda between Russia and the Turks in 1774. In 1743 Frederick the Great ordered that the proceedings of the Berlin Academy should be published in French on the grounds that ‘to be useful, academies should communicate their discoveries in the universal language, and that language is French’. In his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Brandebourg (Memoirs to serve as a history of the house of Brandenburg) he added that it was the writers of Louis XIV’s reign who had made French the universal language of scholars, politicians, women and courtiers, replacing Latin as the lingua franca. It was to be heard in every civilized part of the continent, he added, and was an indispensable passport to polite society. For all these reasons he defended his decision to write in a language not his own, arguing that it was no more strange for a German to write in French than it was for a Roman at the time of Cicero to write in Greek.
L’EUROPE FRANÇAISE?
This influence naturally found its way into palace architecture outside France. Virtually all royal, princely and aristocratic patrons included an extended stay at Versailles as part of their Grand Tour (although Frederick the Great was a notable exception). Augustus the Strong of Saxony-Poland even commissioned his court painter, Louis Silvestre, to immortalize in paint the moment when his eldest son was presented to Louis XIV. Those who could not travel to Versailles to experience its wonders at first hand could make their acquaintance through the numerous descriptions and illustrations that were published. In 1663 Louis instructed Israel Silvestre (Louis’ father) to engrave ‘all his palaces, royal houses, the most beautiful views and aspects of his gardens, public assemblies, Carrousels and outskirts of cities’. This commission initiated a series of magnificent volumes, themselves art-objects of high value, broadcasting French culture across the length and breadth of Europe. As André Félibien, the secretary of the Royal Academy of Architecture, commented: ‘it is by means of these prints that all nations can admire the sumptuous edifices which the king has built everywhere, and the rich ornamentation which embellishes them’. Fifty years after the Sun King’s death, the architect Pierre Patte wrote in Monuments erected in France to the glory of Louis XV:
Travel through Russia, Prussia, Denmark, Württemberg, the Palatinate, Bavaria, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and everywhere you will find French architects occupying the most important positions. At St Petersburg, La Mothe is the premier architect, at Berlin Le Geay; at Copenhagen, Jardin; at Munich, Cuvilliés; at Stuttgart, La Guêpière; at Mannheim, Pigage; at Madrid, Marquet; at Parma, Petitot…Paris performs for Europe the role of Greece when the arts triumphed there: it provides artists for all the rest of the world.
Patte himself was architect to the dukes of Zweibrücken from 1761–90.
It was authoritative comments such as Patte’s that prompted Louis Réau to give his history of European culture, first published in 1938, the title: L’Europe française. Those were also the opening words of the book, with an exclamation mark added for emphasis and celebration. His sentiment has been repeated many times since, with a frequency that has increased as actual French cultural influence has declined. Part of the table of contents of a standard general history of Europe, published in 1959 by Roland Mousnier and Ernest Labrousse, reads: ‘L’unité de l’Europe: L’Europe française–le français, langue européenne–l’art français, art européen–architecture française–musique française–sculpture française–costume française–cuisine française–L’invasion de l’Europe par la France’. Yet these celebrations of French hegemony, whether contemporary or subsequent, do not fit very well with visual impressions of the artefacts. Most buildings constructed outside France during this period just do not look French. If a national label does have to be attached to, say, the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, the Amalienborg in Copenhagen, the Royal Palace in Stockholm, the Černin Palace on the Hradčany in Prague, the Esterházy Palace at Eisenstadt, the Liechtenstein Palace, the Belvedere or the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna, Bamberg, Würzburg or Pommersfelden in Franconia, Ludwigsburg or Bruchsal in south-western Germany–or whatever–then that label would have to be ‘Italian’, for the architects of all these buildings were either Italian, had trained in Italy or had studied with Italianate architects. In architecture, and indeed in all the visual arts and music, it would make more sense to write a book entitled L’Europa italiana, with or without an exclamation mark.
It is something of a truism that ‘Italy’ was merely a geographical expression, that particularist antagonisms were rife, that only a small minority of the population could understand the Italian language, and so on. Yet contemporaries clearly did have a clear appreciation of an Italian culture, whether they were Italians themselves or outsiders. Just one example of this kind of sentiment must suffice, but it could be replicated at will. In 1739 the chevalier Charles de Brosses wrote to his brother from Rome that the English were respected ‘throughout Italy’ because they had lots of money and spent it freely, but the French were universally disliked because of their arrogant prejudice that the only right way of doing things was the French way. He then showed he was no exception by observing sourly that the English visitors spent all their time playing billiards, leaving Rome without knowing even where to find the Colosseum.
This is not to say that French influence was not important. It can be found to a greater or lesser extent in many palaces across the continent: in the Wittelsbach palace of Nymphenburg outside Munich, for example, where the chief architect, Joseph Effner, had been a pupil of Germain Boffrand. A French flavour was even more apparent in the exquisite hunting-lodge Amalienburg in the adjoining park, the work of the Walloon François Cuvilliés, who began his career in the Elector’s service as court dwarf but was then seconded to Paris to train as an architect. In his photographic survey of ‘French architecture in Germany in the eighteenth century’, Pierre du Colombier listed eighty buildings in thirty-nine different places and forty-three architects. If that sounds like a resurrection of Louis Réau’s ‘L’Europe française!’, it should be added by way of qualification that many of the buildings were either minor (a gate at Heidelberg, a private house at Frankfurt am Main, for example) or represented modest contributions to a structure that was patently not French (the episcopal palaces at Brühl and Würzburg, for example). Moreover, the list of architects includes several of German or Italian origin, apparently on the grounds that they were either lucky enough to work with French architects or were sensible enough to work in the French style. A distinction needs to be drawn between the fashion set by Versailles and the styles in which the attempts at emulation were built. It can also be seen in the subsequent addition of smaller hunting-lodges and pleasure-palaces on the lines of Marly or the Trianon, as revealed by the names of the German equivalents–‘Solitude’ (Stuttgart), ‘Mon Repos’ (Ludwigsburg), ‘Château de Mon Aise’ (Trier), and so on.
It can also be seen in the plethora of secular palaces that covered Europe during this period. It was not so much the architectural style of Versailles that was copied, rather the impetus to create a very large palace on a green-field site. One example must suffice, but it is a good one. When the younger son of Philip V of Spain became King of Naples in 1735 as Charles VII, he found the royal palace in the capital (previously the residence of the viceroy of Spain) seriously inadequate for his perceived needs. Of course he set about a major programme of reconstruction, but his main energies were devoted to a brand-new palace 25 miles (40 km) to the north-east at Caserta. His architect, Luigi Vanvitelli, the son of a painter from Utrecht, created for him a structure of colossal size: 800 feet long, 600 feet wide, 120 feet high (245 × 180 × 36 m) and containing around 1,200 rooms. Well might George Hersey comment: ‘In its very size and universality it is one of the earliest megapalaces, the forerunner…of the buildings of the later British Empire, of Fascism and Nazism, and of America’s enormous classical temples in Washington.’ Although its relative austerity has allowed one architectural historian, Michael Florisoone, to acclaim it as one of the earliest signs of a mid-eighteenth century turn to neo-classicism, a more common reaction is to find the uniformity of its thirty-six identical bays simply monotonous. As James Lees-Milne tartly observed: ‘The serried windows and the detailed ornament are lost in the enormous bulk like a small necklace upon the bosom of an immoderately fat woman.’ However, once inside the palace, the visitor’s progress from the central arch to the octagonal vestibule and its dramatic staircase has been variously acclaimed as ‘superbly successful’ (Anthony Blunt) and ‘one of the baroque masterpieces of eighteenth century Europe’ (Lees-Milne).
