# Transcript

NARRATION:
How did royal patronage promote art practice.
Now part of the point of collecting antique and Renaissance art was to train up artists to use their skill in the service of the crown. From 1600, for two hundred years, the kings painters were given lodgings in the Louvre.
In 1648 the Royal Academy of Painting was founded to give these artists a proper training, and this too was housed in the palace of the Louvre. Now artists received into the academy were guaranteed a job for life. A key part of the training were the lectures administered by the academicians evaluating and explaining paintings in the royal collection.
For example, on the 7th May, 1667, the kings first painter, Charles le Brun, lectured on Raphael’s St. Michael and the Dragon, praising Raphael for his composition, for his depiction of the human body as if motivated by the divine spirit.
A month later, the painter Philippe de Champaigne chose Titian’s Entombment, a recent acquisition by Louis XIV, this time praising the Venetian artist’s use of colour and light and shade. Philippe showed how Titian had daringly cast shadow over Christ’s upper body and head, while dramatising the tragedy of Christ’s death by illuminating his lifeless legs and feet.
Comparing the skills of different artists at composition, drawing, colour and expression, became a staple form of debate which informed current art practice.
An amateur painter and critic, Roger de Piles, even drew up tables of scores out of twenty. This set the cat among the pigeons, since he was a fanatical fan of the Venetian colourists, and of Rubens.
In 1622, Rubens had been commissioned to paint a cycle of huge paintings, commemorating the achievements of Marie de Medici, mother of King Louis XIII.
Compared with most French artists, Rubens commanded a hugely expressive range, a vibrant use of colour, and an acute observation of the body. For composition and expression, de Piles awarded Rubens eighteen and seventeen out of twenty, equalled only Raphael, while for colour he gave a mark of seventeen, only bettered by the Venetian artists Titian and Giorgione. Only for drawing did he mark him down, to thirteen.
By contrast, the French painter Nicolas Poussin, who spent most of his working life in Rome, was admired for his knowing references to antique sculpture and reliefs. De Piles gave him seventeen for drawing, and fifteen each for composition and expression, but only six for colour. Nevertheless it was following Poussin’s erudite example that French academic art aspired to emulate and outdo the Italian Renaissance. Charles le Brun, the king’s first painter, spent three years in Italy with Poussin, and tried to learn from his master’s style.
French painters and critics returned to the comparative analysis of Poussin and Rubens, for the next hundred and fifty years. It’s notable that an artist actively involved in the revolution, Jacques Louis David, should have chosen to paint in a style heavily influenced by Poussin and antique sculpture.
His version of the Sabine Women, which depicts the women trying to stop their Roman husbands from fighting their Sabine brothers, is as cold as a Roman marble frieze, but packed with emotional power.
By contrast, Eugene Delacroix, in the 1820s, borrowed heavily from Rubens, in his use of colour, and dramatic composition. He closely studied Rubens’s Marie de Medici cycle.
So, having ready access to these works in the Royal Collection formed the basis of an artists education.
Just as artists like Poussin studied the antique, so painters later were to study Poussin, Rubens, and the Italian artists of the Renaissance.
Under Louis XIV and his ministers, there was a symbiotic relationship between the collection of antique and Renaissance art, the development of artistic education under the Royal Academy, and regular employment of the best artists in public commissions for the king. When carried out with vigour and conviction, these three strands of royal policy produced great advantages for the king, as a form of propaganda, celebrating the kings achievements. It also formed the tradition of high art, which could be handed on to later generations.
An important part of the painter’s or sculptor’s education remained the trip to Rome as pensionnaire of the French school. Young painters and sculptors were sent there by the Royal Academy to copy the best examples, and this was all part of the process of preparing painters and sculptors for work in the kings service.
Among the young sculptors who studied in Rome, were the brothers Nicholas and Guillaume Coustou.
GENEVIEVE BRESC: Curator of Sculpture (Translation)
The Coustou brothers won Academic scholarships to Rome. This was the great encounter with the Antique. Nicholas Coustou copies the Borghese Gladiator - copied the Farnese Hercules - at the time in the great collections in Rome. Back in France, they joined the Royal Workshops.
They followed the highest level of careers. They were ‘associated’ and then ‘received’ in the Academy on presentation of a masterpiece - it was just like the old guild system - but at the same time a way of flattering the king. Nicholas Coustou’s masterpiece was this sculpture: Apollo unveiling a bust of Louis XIV, after a model by Le Brun - a perfect example of court art.
TIM BENTON
Among the notable works of Nicholas’s younger brother Guillaume, are these horse tamers, loosely based on the famous sculptures placed on the Curinale Hill in Rome.
But you didn’t have to follow the traditional route to receive royal patronage.
The sculptor, Puget, began his career carving figureheads in the naval dockyards in Toulon. His reputation spread, and the king gave him two great blocks of marble to fashion as he pleased.
This is a most unusual subject. Alexander the Great, on whom Louis XIV modelled himself, had gone to see the great philosopher Diogenes, who lived, naked, in a barrel. When Alexander and his retinue arrived, he asked the philosopher how he could help him, and Diogenes replied - just get out of my light. Now since Louis XIV also represented himself as the sun king, this is a potentially treasonous representation.
In the other great block of marble, Puget attempted a great and terrible episode from classical legend. It represents the antique athlete Milo of Crotona, who in his old age tries to tear a tree down with his bare hands. His fingers are trapped, and he’s attacked by a lion. This work has always been seen as a key piece in the royal collection of French sculpture.
Puget’s unconventional career and troubled personality allowed him to be presented as a heroic genius, in the mould of Michael Angelo.
When the entrance hall of the new museum was decorated in 1800, Puget’s Milo is shown as the representative of French sculpture, to be compared with Michel Angelo’s Moses. The antique Apollo Belvedere in Rome and the Colossus of Memnon, in Egypt.
In designs for frescos decorating the nineteenth century Louvre, the Milo crops up again and again, as a talisman for the supremacy of French sculpture.
This portrait of the king’s first painter, Charles Le Brun, in a sense sums up the whole career of a successful official artist. On the table is an engraving of his painting, the Tent of Darius. It was this painting which so impressed the king, that he took him on as court painter. The portrait also shows le Brun’s classical training.
We can see a bronze statuette of the Borghese Gladiator, very like the one Nicholas Coustou made in Rome two years before this portrait was painted. Coustou had copied it from the famous life sized bronze Hellenistic statue which was then in Rome. Doing studies of this kind was how young artists developed their skills.
Behind it are representations of the great works of painterly propaganda which le Brun carried out for Louis XIV. You can see the conquest of the Franche Conté, from the Gallery de Glaces in Versailles, where le Brun painted the vault with scenes celebrating military victories.
To see this side of le Brun’s work in the Louvre, we can look at these enormous paintings of the conquests of Alexander the Great, commissioned in 1673, which Louis would have interpreted as an allegory of his own military prowess - and nobility. These paintings flattered the king by analogy.
It may seem surprising that these examples of royal patronage, were given pride of place in the new central museum during the French Revolution.
In complete contrast, the full sized bronze statue of the king by the sculptor Girardon, of which this is the study, was demolished during the revolution, along with many explicit celebrations of royal authority.
The reason the le Brun painting survived, was because they were allegorical. The virtues of Alexander which they extolled could be detached from the king, and be seen as universal examples of heroism and courage.
Le Brun’s heads were based on his comparative study of the depiction of emotions. It was the ability of art to convey complex emotional states, le Brun claimed, which set art above poetry.
By the mid eighteenth century, the very series of high art which had been developed by the Royal Academy began to be used against King Louis XV and his court. Critics began to assert that the kings collection was too important to be hidden away in the royal palaces. The king had a duty to raise the level of public taste by putting on show the best works of the past.