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Crowning Glories
Netherlandish Realism and the French Imagination During the Reign of Louis XIV
Harriet Stone (Author)
9781487504427
Hardback, published 25 March 2019
312 pages, 42 b&w illustrations
24.4 x 16.5 x 2.3 cm, 0.58 kg
"This work is notable for its rich, sensitive, and perceptive analysis of the artistic works, and the thought-provoking parallels and contrasts developed throughout." - Richard Maber (Modern Language Review) "Stone makes a persuasive claim by demonstrating how Dutch realistic painting gradually chipped away at the French monarchy’s hold on ideas.[…] This claim is bold enough to require extensive explanation, which Stone provides within a strong conceptual framework."
Crowning Glories integrates Louis XIV’s propaganda campaigns, the transmission of Northern art into France, and the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century – three historical touchstones – to examine what it would have meant for France’s elite to experience the arts in France simultaneously with Netherlandish realist painting. In an expansive study of cultural life under the Sun King, Harriet Stone considers the monarchy’s elaborate palace decors, the court’s official records, and the classical theatre alongside Northern images of daily life in private homes, urban markets, and country fields. Stone argues that Netherlandish art assumes an unobtrusive yet, for the history of ideas, surprisingly dramatic role within the flourishing of the arts, both visual and textual, in France during Louis XIV’s reign. Netherlandish realist art represented thinking about knowledge that challenged the monarchy’s hold on the French imagination, and its efforts to impose the king’s portrait as an ideal and proof of his authority. As objects appreciated for their aesthetic and market value, Northern realist paintings assumed an uncontroversial place in French royal and elite collections. Flemish and Dutch still lifes, genre paintings, and cityscapes, however, were not merely accoutrements of power, acquisitions made by those with influence and money. Crowning Glories reveals how the empirical orientation of Netherlandish realism exposed French court society to a radically different mode of thought, one that would gain full expression in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Hiding in Plain Sight Part I: Divergent Patterns Part II: Transformations Part III: Patterns of Change Coda: Trompe l’oeil Illusions and the Thoughts They Inspire Notes
List of Images
1. Two Models in Context: Northern Realist Art in France
2. France at the Intersection: Configuring the French Response to Northern Realism
3. Fractured Spaces: Staging the King’s Portrait
4. In Death as in Life
5. The Great Reveal
6. Legacies
Works Cited