Crowning Glories: Netherlandish Realism and the French Imagination during the Reign of Louis XIV
© 2019
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.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 312 pages
- Illustrations: 42
- Dimensions: 6.5in x 0.9in x 9.6in
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Reviews
"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"Crowning Glories is insightful, original, and certainly innovative. To my knowledge, no other work offers so interesting a cultural and historical appreciation of two of the most creative and lasting artistic traditions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European society."
Mitchell Greenberg, Goldwin Smith Professor of Romance Studies, Chair, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University"Harriet Stone, an eminent scholar of early modern Europe, has written an exciting, original, and beautifully composed work. This work offers a genuine comparative paradigm grounded firmly in rigorous scholarship. It readily transcends the limitations traditionally imposed by many practitioners of art history and by those scholars focused specifically on the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."
Louise Horowitz, professor emerita of French, Rutgers University -
Author Information
Harriet Stone is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. -
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
List of ImagesIntroduction: Hiding in Plain Sight
Part I: Divergent Patterns
1. Two Models in Context: Northern Realist Art in France
2. France at the Intersection: Configuring the French Response to Northern RealismPart II: Transformations
3. Fractured Spaces: Staging the King’s Portrait
4. In Death as in LifePart III: Patterns of Change
5. The Great Reveal
6. LegaciesCoda: Trompe l’oeil Illusions and the Thoughts They Inspire
Notes
Works Cited
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Subjects and Courses