About the Book
The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.
Table of Contents:
Enduring Versailles
Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia and Mark Ledbury, University of Sydney, Australia
PART ONE: MAKING THE PALACE
1. The Other Palace: Versailles & the Louvre, Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University, UK)
2. The grands décors of Charles Le Brun: between plan and serendipity, Bénédicte Gady (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, France)
3. Artisans du roi: Collaboration at the Gobelins, Louvre and the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture under the Influence of the Petite Académie, Florian Knothe (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
4. Rough Surfaces: Etching Louis XIV’s Grotto at Versailles, Louis Marchesano (Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA)
PART TWO: VERSAILLES LIFE
5. Porcelain and Power: The Meaning of Sèvres Porcelain in ancien regime France, Matthew Martin (National Gallery of Victoria, Australia)
6. Hair, Politics, and Power at the Court of Versailles, Kimberly Chrisman Campbell (Independent scholar, USA)
7. The Politics of Attachment: Visualizing Young Louis XV and his Governess, Mimi Hellman (Skidmore College, USA)
8. Courting favour: the apartments of the princesse de Lamballe at Versailles, 1767-1789, Sarah Grant (Victoria and Albert Museum, UK)
PART THREE: OUTSIDERS
9. Enslaved Muslims at the Sun King’s Court, Meredith Martin (New York University, USA) and Gillian Weiss (Case Western Reserve University, USA)
10. A Turk in the Hall of Mirrors, David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
11. Cornelis Hop (1685-1762), Dutch Ambassador to the Court of Louis XV, Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA)
VERSAILLES NOW
12. Melancholy, Nostalgia, Dreams: Adventures in the Grand Cimetière Magique, Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney, Australia)
13. American Versailles: from the Gilded Age to Generation Wealth, Robert Wellington (Australian National University, Australia)
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Mark Ledbury is Power Professor of Art History & Visual Culture and Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of James Northcote, History Painting, and the Fables (2014) and Sedaine, Greuze and the Boundaries of Genre (2000). He is also the editor of three books, including Fictions of Art History (2013).
Robert Wellington is Senior Lecturer in Art History & Art Theory at the Australian National University, Australia. He is an art historian with a special interest in the role of material culture in history making and cross-cultural exchange at the Court of Louis XIV. Prior to receiving a PhD in Art History from the University of Sydney, he has ten years' experience in various roles in the contemporary arts sector. He is the Book Placement Editor for Early Modern Art History Studies (1500-1800) for H-France, and on the advisory board for Bloomsbury’s Material Culture of Art & Design book series. His monograph, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past, was published in 2015.
Review :
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’.
With its emphasis on artistic process and collaboration, as well as on questions of race and gender, The Versailles Effect rewrites our understanding of Versailles as both a real and imagined place, from its construction in the seventeenth century to its reverberations in contemporary culture. Its lucidly written essays by leading scholars in the field are an indispensable resource for understanding the Château and its global artistic and political networks.
This splendid anthology will fascinate all students of Versailles and Court culture more generally. By revealing new facets (and inhabitants) of an ostensibly familiar site, it opens fresh vistas on the role of visual and material culture in the palace’s enduring life.
The refreshingly original and broad-ranging essays assembled in this volume eloquently demonstrate that Versailles was so much more than the magnificent palace of the Sun King. It was a domain, physical, cultural, artistic, political; an experience, and an idea, whose power, meanings, and effects still resonate today.
