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Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past provides a new interpretation of objects and images commissioned by Louis XIV (1638-1715) to document his reign for posterity. The Sun King's image-makers based their prediction of how future historians would interpret the material remains of their culture on contemporary antiquarian methods, creating new works of art as artifacts for a future time. The need for such items to function as historical evidence led to many pictorial developments, and medals played a central role in this. Coin-like in form but not currency, the medal was the consummate antiquarian object, made in imitation of ancient coins used to study the past. Yet medals are often elided from the narrative of the arts of ancient r?me France, their neglect wholly disproportionate to the cultural status that they once held. This revisionary study uncovers a numismatic sensibility throughout the iconography of Louis XIV, and in the defining monuments of his age. It looks beyond the standard political reading of the works of art made to document Louis XIV's history, to argue that they are the results of a creative process wedded to antiquarianism, an intellectual culture that provided a model for the production of history in the grand si?e.
This richly illustrated volume, the first devoted to maritime art and galley slavery in early modern France, shows how royal propagandists used the image and labor of enslaved Muslims to glorify Louis XIV. Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labor on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France’s King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom’s coasts. By examining a wide range of artistic productions—ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints—Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital aspect of royal representation and unsettle a standard picture of art and power in early modern France. With an abundant selection of startling images, many never before published, The Sun King at Sea emphasizes the role of esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks)—rowers who were captured or purchased from Islamic lands—in building and decorating ships and other art objects that circulated on land and by sea to glorify the Crown. Challenging the notion that human bondage vanished from continental France, this cross-disciplinary volume invites a reassessment of servitude as a visible condition, mode of representation, and symbol of sovereignty during Louis XIV’s reign.
""Analyzing French fashion prints and what these images represent and reveal about the fashion and culture of the seventeenth-century."--Provided by publisher"--
Excerpt from History of Louis XIV WE all live a double life: the external life. Which the world sees, and the internal life of hopes and fears, joys and griefs, temptations and sins, which the world sees not, and of which it knows but little. None lead this double life more emphatically than those who are seated upon thrones. Though this historic sketch contains allu sions to all the most important events in the reign of Louis XIV., it has been the main ob jcet of the writer to develop the inner life of the palace; to lead the reader into the interior of the Louvre, the Tuileries, Versailles, and Marly, and to exhibit the monarch as a man, in the details of domestic privacy. This can more easily be done in reference to Louis XIV. Than any other king. Very many of the prominent members of his house hold left their autobiographies, filled with the minutest incidents of every-day life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
This monograph examines the wide artistic production of Louis XIV's most prolific and powerful artist, Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), illustrating the magnificence of his paintings and focusing particularly on the interiors and decorative art works produced according to his designs. In his joint capacities of Premier peintre du roi, director of the Gobelins manufactory and rector of the Acad mie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Le Brun exercised a previously unprecedented influence on the production of the visual arts - so much so that some scholars have repeatedly described him as 'dictator' of the arts in France. The Sovereign Artist explores how Le Brun operated in his diverse fields of activities, linking and juxtaposing his portraiture, history painting and pictorial theory with his designs for architecture, tapestries, carpets and furniture. It argues that Le Brun sought to create a repeatable and easily recognizable visual language associated with Louis XIV, in order to translate the king's political claims for absolute power into a visual form. How he did this is discussed through a series of individual case studies ranging from Le Brun's lost equestrian portrait of Louis XIV, and his involvement in the Querelle du coloris at the Acad mie, to his scheme for 93 Savonnerie carpets for the Grande Galerie at the Louvre, his Histoire du roy tapestry series, his decoration of the now destroyed Escalier des Ambassadeurs at Versailles and the dramatic destruction of the Sun King's silver furniture. One key theme is the relation between the unity of the visual arts, to which Le Brun aspired, and the strong hierarchical distinctions he made between the liberal arts and the mechanical crafts: while his lectures at the Acad mie advocated a visual and conceptual unity in painting and architecture, they were also a means by which he attempted to secure the newly gained status of painting as a liberal art, and therefore to distinguish it from the mechanical crafts which he oversaw the production of at the Gobelins. His artistic and architectural aspirations were comparable to those of his Roman contemporary Gianlorenzo Bernini, summoned to Paris in 1665 to design the Louvre's East fa ade and to create a portrait bust of Louis XIV. Bernini's failure to convince the king and Colbert of his architectural scheme offered new opportunities for Le Brun and his French contemporaries to prove themselves capable of solving the architectural problems of the Louvre and to transform it into a palace appropriate "to the grandeur and the magnificence of the prince who was] to inhabit it" (Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Nicolas Poussin in 1664). The comparison between Le Brun and Bernini not only illustrates how France sought artistic supremacy over Italy during the second half of the 17th century, but further helps to demonstrate how Le Brun himself wanted to be perceived: beyond acting as a translator of the king's artistic ambition, the artist appears to have sought his own sovereign authority over the visual arts.
The story of Louis XIV-the "Sun King" of France, is a gripping tale of royal grandeur, despotism, corruption, and moral degeneracy, which, in its very extravagance, laid the seed for the destruction of the French royal house and the infamous revolution of 1789. During Louis XIV's lengthy reign he engaged in what seemed to be a never-ending series of foreign wars, all the while furiously waging interreligious strife at home, as he ruthlessly suppressed Protestant dissent and political conspiracies. His reign saw wars with the Dutch, the Austrians, and the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict which ultimately spread to North America and involved almost every power on the European continent. As if these wars were not enough of a drain on the economy, Louis XIV's lavish court lifestyle also exhausted the treasury, and all of France suffered grievously as he and his nobles lived debauched lives with no thought of tomorrow. Louis XIV's successors would ultimately pay the price for his seventy-two-year despotic and careless reign, and it is, as the author notes, regrettable that those who plunged France into the misery in which it found itself, died peacefully in their beds, leaving others to be blamed. "The thoughtful reader will perceive that in this long and wicked reign Louis XIV was sowing the wind from which his descendants reaped the whirlwind. It was the despotism of Louis XIV and of Louis XV which ushered in that most sublime of all earthly dramas, the French Revolution."-from the Preface.
Louis XIV was a man like any other, but the money and attention lavished on his public image by the French government transformed him into a godlike figure. In this engrossing book, an internationally respected historian gives an account of contemporary representations of Louis XIV and shows how the making of the royal image illuminates the relationship between art and power. Images of Louis XIV included hundreds of oil paintings and engravings, three-hundred-odd medals struck to commemorate the major events of the reign, sculptures, and bronzes, as well as plays, ballets (in which the king himself sometimes appeared on stage), operas, odes, sermons, official newspapers and histories, fireworks, fountains, and tapestries. Drawing on an analysis of these representations as well as on surviving documentary sources, Peter Burke shows the conscious attempt to "invent" the image of the king and reveals how the supervision of the royal image was entrusted to a commitee, the so-called small academy. This book is not only a fascinating chronological study of the mechanics of the image-making of a king over the course of a seventy-year reign but is also an investigation into the genre of cultural construction. Burke discusses the element of propaganda implicit in image-making, the manipulation of seventeenth-century media of communication (oral, visual, and textual) and their codes (literary and artistic), and the intended audience and its response. He concludes by comparing and contrasting Louis's public image with that of other rulers ranging from Augustus to contemporary American presidents.
The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape-or even radically redefine-our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.