• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2391 0

of rooms were adorned with crystal chandeliers, multicolored marble, solid-silver furniture, and crimson velvet hangings embroidered in gold. The king himself, covered in gold, diamonds, and feathers, received important guests seated on a nine-foot, canopied silver throne. His royal rising (lever) and retiring (coucher) were attended by flocks of courtiers in formal rituals as important to the court as the rising and setting of the sun. Four hundred ninety-eight people were required merely to present the king with a meal. “We are not like private people,” said the king. “We belong entirely to the public.”

Visual impact took precedence over creature comforts in the palace. The vast marble floors made the interior so frigid, water froze in basins, while the thousands of candles illuminating soirees made summer events stiflingly hot. Despite such drawbacks, Louis XIV hosted fêtes like jousting tournaments, banquets, and Molière comedies. The ballroom was garlanded with flowers. Outdoor trees were illuminated with thousands of pots of candles and hung with oranges from Portugal or currants from Holland. As La Fontaine said, “Palaces turned into gardens and gardens into palaces.”

The grounds contained a private zoo with elephants, flamingos, and ostriches, a Chinese carousel turned by servants pumping away underground, and gondolas on the mile-long Grand Canal. The Versailles court lived in unmatched luxury amid opulent furnishings and artworks, most of which qualify as decorative rather than fine art.

Le Brun & Hardouin-Mansart, Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, c. 1680. This 240-foot-long gallery was lined with massive silver furniture (later melted down to finance a war). With seventeen floor-to-ceiling windows and mirrors reflecting the sun, this gallery impressed one visitor as “an avenue of light.”

Le Nôtre, Parterre du Midi, 1669-85, Versailles. The symmetrical patterns of Versailles’ park and gardens restructured nature on a vast scale.

GARDENING ON A GRAND SCALE

The vastness of Versailles’ interior was dwarfed by extensive gardens designed by André Le Nôtre. In place of marshes and forests, he imposed a mathematically exact scheme of gardens, lawns, and groves of trees, “The symmetry, always the symmetry,” Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Maintenon complained. To avoid the monotony of geometric patterns, Le Nôtre emphasized water — both in motion, as in the gold-covered Fountain of Apollo, and in large reflecting pools. His scheme required so much water that Louis XI V assigned 30,000 troops in a failed attempt to divert the River Eure from 40 miles away.

ROCOCO

Rococo was born in Paris, where it coincided with the reign of Louis XV (1723-74). By 1760, it was considered outmoded in France but was in vogue until the end of the century for luxurious castles and churches throughout Germany, Austria, and Central Europe. Rococo was primarily a form of interior decoration, the name deriving from the “rocaille” motif of shellwork and pebbles ornamenting grottoes and fountains.

In some ways, the Rococo style looks like the word itself. The decorative arts were the special display ground for its curvilinear, delicate ornamentation. Floors were inlaid in complicated patterns of wood veneer, furniture was richly carved and decorated with Gobelin upholstery and inlays of ivory and tortoiseshell. Clothing, silverwork, and china were also overwrought with curlicues as well as flowers, shells, and leaves. Even carriage designers avoided straight lines for carved swirls and scrolls, and horses wore immense plumes and bejeweled harnesses. Rococo art was as decorative and nonfunctional as the effete aristocracy that embraced it.

PAINTING PICNICS IN THE PARK. After Louis XIV died in 1715, the aristocracy abandoned Versailles for Paris, where the salons of their ornate townhouses epitomized the new Rococo style. The nobility lived a frivolous existence devoted to pleasure, reflected in a characteristic painting, the “fête galante,” an outdoor romp peopled by elegantly attired young lovers. The paintings of Antoine