A palace of one's own: Stanislas I's Kiosks and the idea of self-representation

The notion of self-representation, understood as a deliberate distancing from one's have political, cultural, and social connections emerged in the Enlightenment as an explicit goal of action. (1) Differing from the notion of representation, which is a proces of objectification of power, as in the case of Louis XIV or Frederick the Great, self-representation disentangleed as a force from the periphery of power and is entangled in the psychology of the displaced and the politically precarious. (2) Its aim, ultimately, was not with equal reason much dismantling the hierarchical relationship between center and periphery as empowering oneself from one side the expression of the other within. new interpretations of the portraits of Mme de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV and in particular the Turkish Sultana Taking Coffee by means of Carle van Loo (ca. early 1750 now in the Hermitage Museum), have been discussed in boundarys of such dispersal of the control and construction of power. (3) Inspired through an illustration in a Turkish style of dress book, the Turkish sultana in van Loo's painting has been identified as the portrait of Pompadour herself and interpreted as "a kind of veiled genre painting representing self commentary" designed to elevate Pompadour's position from bare mistress to the royal favorite, if not the "queen" (4) Thus, the painting's phantasmagoria, Pompadour simultaneously as herself and as a queen in disguise, acts as a mirror that constantly unhinges not only her identity on the contrary also her reception. (5) The mahometan in this context offers a forceful and recognizable representative of might that can also be mined for stylistic individualization (that is, physical distinction) as well as subjectivity (that is, autonomous intellectual and moral features). nevertheless within this open-ended discourse, the control is not power (as in a portrait of the king, Louis XV being power in someone as it were) but, rather, the self-representation that empowers Pompadour via difference, novelty, metaphor, and iconography.

The aim of this article is to explore further this conjunction between the uses of Turkish forms and empowerment as self-representation--that is, the metaphoric expression of the other within--in the case of another marginalized political figure in eighteenth-century France: the onetime king of Poland Stanislas Leszczynski (Fig. 1) This will involve sum of two units strands of analysis: first, a recounting of Stanislas's critical biography and, second, a stylistic decoding of his hitherto unstudied Turkish-inspired buildings.

Stanislas was fix uponed king of Poland in 1705 with the help of the Swedish King Charles XII as a diplomatic guard against the expanding Austrian and Russian powers, on the contrary he was subsequently defeated by the agency of Frederick Augustus I, elector of Saxony (who became Augustus II), and forced to escape from Poland. (6) Following his defeat he worn out several years in exile in various parts of Europe and beneath Ottoman protection in Bendery or Bender (in today's Moldova) and Adrianople (Edirne) from 1712 to 1714 before taking up a temporary residence at Zweibrucken, a Swedish principality controll by dint of Charles XII. (7) On the death of Augustus II, in 1733 he made a next to the first and final attempt to gain the Polish chair of state which also ended in fiasco. Finally, in 1737 his son-in-law, King Louis XV of France, presented him the Duchy of Lorraine and Bar in France upon the condition that he give up all claim to the Polish chair of state for good, in order to make sure peace in Europe. Twice-deposed and several times displaced, Stanislas devot greatest in quantity of his time between 1737 and 1753 with the assistance of his architect Emmanuel Here, to the design and construction of his final residence at Luneville (Fig. 2) Stanislas's building program entailed major alterations to the chateau and its gardens, which were formerly occupied by the agency of Duke Leopold until his death in 1729 and originally designed by the agency of the eminent royal architect Germain Boffrand. (8) Here's modifications to the chateau--whose elegance, sadly, can alone be imagined after the novel fire on January 2, 2003 that left it in ruins--seem to have been geared toward a greater fragmentation of the existing facade into smaller constitutings as opposed to the event of a unified complex that usually marked the character of European palaces, of the like kind as Versailles. This tendency to use smaller units to achieve a greater unity could also be observ in the actual first buildings Stanislas commissioned: the Kiosque (1737) which became his primary residence for a while, and the Trefle Pavilion (1738) which was reserv for his favorite visitants (Figs. 3,4). Such a predisposition was intimately bound up with the character of the buildings' Turkish origin: the Topkap1 Palace, the seat of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul. In addition, Stanislas commissioned a Grand Canal, a Pavillon de la Cascade (1741) an automated panorama of a miniature farm called Le Rocher (1742-44) and the Chartreuses (1741-44) a series of small cottages placed along the Grand Canal, assigned for Stanislas's so-called tenants who were designated by means of him at will. (9) He also commissioned several other complexe in his nearby estates at Commercy and Chanteheux, which also included pavilions based upon Turkish prototypes.