Artisans & Kings...
Selected Treasures from the Musée du Louvre Coming to Colorado
Works of art from the courts of France's King Louis XIV and his two immediate successors will grace Denver this Fall.
More than 125 superb objets d'art from the opulent Baroque court of Le Roi Soleil or the Sun King, France's Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715), and his two ostentatious Rococo successors comprise Artisans and Kings: Selected Treasures from the Musée du Louvre. This first international loan exhibition to be mounted in the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum will be on display from October 6, 2007 through January 6, 2008. The Musée du Louvre has never lent art on such a vast scale to a museum in the western United States. Artisans and Kings... is the first of three shows organized by both institutions; two more exhibitions of French treasures are planned for the DAM in 2008 and 2009.
During the French Revolution, the nucleus of the Musée du Louvre's collection was formed in 1793 when the state appropriated the three Bourbon rulers' private possessions. The show's extraordinary drawings, paintings, sculptures and works of decorative art, including ornate furniture and elaborate tapestries, reveal the rich history of royal artistic patronage in later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, unrivalled at the time in western Europe. Artists represented in the show include Titian (ca. 1488-1576), Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806).
The Exhibition's Organization
- Collections of Kings illustrates the Bourbon monarchs' artistic tastes. Masterpieces from the Italian and Northern Renaissances and Baroque era abound in this section of the exhibition. Et in Arcadia Ego (The Arcadian Shepherds) (ca. 1638-40) by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) is joined by the imposing bronze bust of Pope Urban VIII (ca. 1640) by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). More than 40 rare drawings by Northern European masters Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1453-1516), Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Pieter Brueghel the Elder (act. by 1551, d. 1569), among others, round out the works on display.
- Politics of Style describes the kings' roles in the production of decorative art.
- Trappings of Power examines how the rulers cultivated their images and used art as propaganda to disseminate their personae to the French masses.
- Crafting a Lifestyle includes public and private works from the royal residence at Versailles.
A Spanish Masterpiece on View
A highlight of Artisans and Kings... is Diego Velázquez's intimate portrait of the Spanish Infanta Margarita (1653). The child is seen alone, stripped of her usual court dwarves, pampered puppies and ladies-in-waiting. Seemingly uncomfortable in her stiff and elaborate royal finery, she engages the viewer with an almost icy cold stare. The puerile porcelain-like Margarita is the embodiment of innocence arrested in time. Three years later, the same youngster played a central role in the artist's visually complex Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor).
Source:
- Loisel, Catherine. Kings as Collectors: Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts from the Musée du Louvre (exh. cat.). Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2006
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