Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives, and Afterlives of the Domaine . Edited by Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington

2021; Oxford University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knab195

1468-2931

Tom Stammers,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

What, where, and when was Versailles? More than a building, Versailles has come to connote not just a physical space but also the model of court society and an enduring cultural myth. This flexibility of associations is captured in the subtitle to this imaginative edited volume: ‘objects, lives, and afterlives’. Several of the fourteen essays here attempt to reconstruct the material world of Versailles, whether topographic (grottoes and parterres) or socio-cultural (Sèvres porcelain and extravagant wigs). These contributions explore the links between craftsmanship, consumption, and politics, and give a vivid sense of how hierarchies were enacted through ceremonial performance. Sarah Grant tracks the fortunes of the Princesse de Lamballe through her successive, often rather crowded, apartments in the palace and their contents, recycled from the Garde-Meuble, despite her status as Marie-Antoinette’s favourite. Mimi Hellman offers an astute reading of various portraits of Mme de Ventadour and her young charge, King Louis XV, to illuminate the affective and symbolic importance of the royal governess to the Bourbon dynasty. Other essays widen the cast of characters by drawing in the testimony of foreign visitors. The letters of Dutch ambassador Cornelius Hop provide a vivid commentary on the little dramas of court life, such as when the ten-year-old king first danced in a ballet or accidentally swallowed a mosaic tile. Ottoman ambassador Mehmed Saïd Pasha undertook a memorable mission to Versailles in 1744 and was granted an exceptional audience in the Hall of Mirrors. David Maskill argues that in the splendid portrait of Mehmed Saïd by Jacques-André Aved, the legible Arabic and Persian script rendered in the diplomatic document could only have been produced with the active collaboration of the sitter. More troubling is the account given by Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss of the presence of ‘Moors’ in the theatricals and visual economy of Versailles. Sometimes mistaken for slaves from the Caribbean, these enslaved Muslims participated in bigger narratives around empire and conversion for Louis XIV, eager to shake off the label of ‘The Most Christian Turk’. This gripping essay gives a new way to read the black figures in many seventeenth-century prints, beyond fashionable exoticism, and points to the wider ‘continuum of coercion’ that underpinned Versailles (p. 156). This is therefore a satisfying, eclectic range of essays, which mix the familiar — the co-ordinating role of Charles Le Brun — with the more oblique and provocative. Hannah Williams demonstrates that the relocation of the court allowed that other, metropolitan, palace, the Louvre, to emerge as a concentrated hub of artistic activity (what she calls a ‘state Kulturforum’, p. 16). Two closing essays muse on Versailles’s evolution from seat of power to museum spectacle and site of fantasy. Mark Ledbury’s analysis of ‘Trianonisation’ shows how the sentimental and spectral figure of Marie-Antoinette has eclipsed the formal majesty of Louis XIV in the postmodern imagination. Meanwhile Robert Wellington points across the Atlantic to show the ripples of Versailles on the gilded homes of the American super-rich, from the Vanderbilts’ Marble House to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.