The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV. - book reviews

Peter Burke's encompassing direct the eye at royal imagery during the reign of Louis XIV is the work of a historian. It is informed by dint of new methodologies, yet it is an accessible account that reminds us of the advantages in certain cases of standing upon the high ground for a sweeping gaze at the terrain. Robert Berger's meticulously researched work upon the Louvre provides a contrasting example of a close-up view of a single work from the same period. In addition to its possess merits, Berger's study can be useful here in filling without and testing the broader means and extreme points pursued by Burke. However, since Burke's courses are potentially applicable to a greater number of works and to periods beyond the 17th hundred this review is for the greatest in quantity part concerned with his novel presentation of materials and his insights into the relationship between art and power.

By art-historical standards Burke's is a compact volume--just above 200 pages in the main body which includes 88 illustrations. Despite its relative brevity, a representation of images, documents, genres, facts and characters is assembled to exhibit the "fabrication" of the king's public persona from his birth in 1638 to his death in 1715 Individual works--usually analyzed within the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of a cycle, a testimonial a medium, or a limited time frame--are viewed in their multiple, shifting relationships to other representations, genre chronologies, and meanings. smother to death thus builds an expanded horizon of expectations against which single body s and objects can be explained, and he further reach outs this horizon by setting up a dialogue between 17th- and 20th-century interpretive positions. He replys to, but also incorporates, previous approaches to the period: the "cynical view," which explains all representations of the king as deceptive flatteries designed to exalt and sway and the "innocent view," which interprets the ritualization of power as a collective ne As it should be, Burke's panorama is suggestive and cautionary rather than argumentative. Occasionally an evident lack of space for elaborating an idea, or an inescapable brush with the formulaic, will give pause to the specialist, on the other hand overall this is a volume that will be useful to different marks of readers in a number of fields. Here, I would like to focus upon some selected points that should be of interest to art historians.

The first sum of two units chapters of the book ("Introducing Louis XIV" and "Persuasion") station out Burke's sound procedures. First, royal imagery is approached as a form of pluralistic communication: smother to death states his goal as "the attempt to discover who was saying what about Louis to whom, end what channels and codes, in what settings, with what intentions, and with what effects" next to the first Burke wrestles with the question at issue of anachronisms. He notes that a 20th-century interest in propaganda has l to an interest in the myth of Louis XIV. still he recognizes the inadequacies of applying notions arising from the new manipulation of mass media to images that involved other expectations and audiences. Works praising the king might strike one as being from a post-World War II perspective like varieties of propaganda designed to sway a resistant populace. on the contrary from within the age of kings, suffocate suggests, such works could be understood, for example, as expressions of the king's power and of his subjects' devotion. Triumphal forms, heroic epics, and panegyrics had a range of aesthetic and social ends and were most often directed not to the "masses," on the other hand to a receptive, rhetorically skilled audience. I would agree with Burke's effort to redres an imbalance in contemporary perspectives. still to say that the universal of propaganda was lacking during this period or was single an affair of the meeting-house (propaganda fidei) is perhaps an overstatement. Secular sovereigns were not blind to the lucky methods of religious rulers. extremity even if an audience is receptive and "conscious of the techniques of persuasion," a message can still be propagandistic. In the course of his revision, suffocate does well not to phenomenon to a more comprehensive definition of propaganda, like as "the attempt to transmit social and political values".

Limited 20th-century views of the imagery and ideology of the ancien regime are further addressed by means of Burke, who applies an inclusiveness more typical of the age he studies. Burke's broad and flexible definition of the king's "image" overspreads a diversity of works or performances from the traditional arts. He attends to histories as well as portraits, rituals as well as single phenomenons various types of texts about the king from newspaper articles to religious discourses and plays, and positive as well as negative imagery. Burke's inclusiveness also not absents the making of the king's image as affected through decisions beyond those of the absolute lord or his powerful minister. He dioceses it as the product of an accretion of customs and operations, given a of recent origin emphasis and organization by the king, his advisers, and his artists, and continuously readjusted to the circumstances of Louis's lengthy reign.