As absolute monarch of the most powerful and wealthy kingdom in Europe during the seventeenth century, Louis XIV, “le roi soleil” (the sun king), identified with, and regarded himself as the successor of, the Roman emperor Augustus. He compared the political dominance of his kingdom to that of imperial Rome.
The French classical painter Nicholas Poussin spent much of his life in Rome (from 1624 until his death in 1665), where he introduced fellow artist Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) to its inspiring monuments and collections. Back in Paris Le Brun belonged to an artistic intelligentsia who admired the Academia di Santa Luca in Rome for its teaching methods and for the traditions of great art based on the examples of ancient Greece and Rome, which it wanted to transmit to Italian artists.
Le Brun first came to the attention of King Louis XIV (1638-1715) for his decoration of the superb chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, built for the king’s finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. Louis placed Le Brun in charge of the decorations of the new palace of Versailles, where he supervised the large team of artists and craftsmen who made the tapestries, paintings, sculptures, ornaments, and furniture—all the decorative ensembles for the palace. Le Brun executed many of the paintings at Versailles, including the ceiling painting with its massed classical allusions in the Hall of Mirrors—The King Governs Alone. He also accompanied Louis on his military campaigns and royal perambulations so that he could make studies of the king and the events in his life for paintings.
Through Le Brun’s growing contact and influence with the king, Cardinal Mazarin (principal minister to King Louis XIV), and the king’s consort, Queen Anne of Austria, the proposal to establish an academy in Paris, modeled on that of the Academia di Santa Luca in Rome, won royal support. The Acade-mie Royale was founded in 1648 with the aim of raising the status of fine arts to the same level as that of epic poetry and ancient rhetoric. It deliberately moved painting and sculpture away from its guilds of craftspeople and into the realm of intellectuals and scholars. To create the best and most relevant contemporary art, artists were required not only to familiarize themselves with the great art of the Italian Renaissance, but also with the art that had inspired it— that of classical Rome and Greece. As well artists needed to be familiar with classical history, mythology, and literature. If they were to continue to receive commissions from their major patron, the royal court, they had to do justice to the representation of their king’s role in contemporary history.
Louis XIV, addressing the Academie, expressed it best: “I entrust to you the most precious thing on earth—my fame” (Walsh 1999, 89). In 1664, in recognition of the importance of the king’s iconography, Colbert, Louis XIV’s secretary of state, was made minister of fine arts, responsible for the Academie. Together he and Le Brun controlled the art of the French nation through their advice to the king and their control of the Academie. They dictated subjects, styles, and universal standards and rules for art and artistic taste. Le Brun became one of the most powerful men in France as King Louis XIV’s “First Painter”—advising the king on artistic matters and attending to important royal commissions (from 1661). In 1665 he became the king’s “Rector,” during which time he helped to found the French Academy in Rome, and then in 1683 he became director of France’s Academie Royale.
The French Academy in Rome was founded in 1666 by Colbert, on Le Brun’s advice, to improve the fine arts of France by providing a base for French artists to study in Rome and to make copies of manuscripts, illustrations of antiquities, and casts of the originals of the great art of ancient Rome and Greece (that which could not be acquired) to send back to France. It became a center for studying ancient monuments and the latest finds—and so it also became involved in archaeology. This permanent base in Rome also provided opportunities to increase the royal collections through the purchase of works of art that came onto the market from private collectors and collections (such as the Germanicus and Cincinnatus sculptures now in the Louvre) and to inspect and negotiate for others that had been recently unearthed or looted from classical sites. Its directors were “cultural spies” who kept the royal court and the Academie Royale informed of the latest and the greatest art in Rome.
Within the first twenty years of its founding the French Academy in Rome had sent numerous casts, copies, and originals back to France, where they adorned the palaces and gardens of the king. However, the loss of so many original antiquities to France and other European countries resulted in Pope Innocent XI’s passing a law curtailing the export of antiquities in 1686. By this time the academy itself was the home of more than a hundred plaster casts of some of the finest pieces of classical art in private collections or in the Vatican and Capitoline museums, and it had to move to larger premises to display them. It became an important destination in Rome in its own right, for both local and foreign visitors, because it was the only place where all of the best pieces were displayed and could be viewed together.
See also Foundation of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (1471); Foundation of the Louvre (1779-1793); Napoleon Loots Rome (1797).
Further Reading
De Grummond, N., ed. 1996. An encyclopedia of the history of classical archaeology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Walsh, L. 1999. Charles Le Brun, “art dictator of France.” In Academies, museums and canons of art, eds. G. Perry and C. Cunningham. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in Association with the Open University Press.
World History
