Let there be opulence: Versailles exhibit reflects glory of palace creator, Sun King Louis XIV

New Versailles exhibit reflects Sun King’s glory

PARIS — The Sun King shines again at Versailles.

Hundreds of long-dispersed portraits, sculptures and tapestries celebrating Louis XIV have returned to Versailles, a former hunting lodge that the autocratic French monarch transformed as a reflection of his glory into a palace of unrivaled opulence.

The exhibit “Louis XIV: The Man and the King” gives visitors the 17th century ruler in all his varied incarnations. A massive oil painting shows the cherub-faced child who ascended to the throne at age five. Imposing marble busts extoll the steely eyed “Louis the Great,” whose iron-fisted leadership helped forge the modern French state. A wax relief captures the elderly monarch — all droopy jowls — facing his own mortality.

The show, which opened Tuesday, also highlights Louis XIV’s artistic tastes. A great champion of music, architecture and gardening — as evidenced by the gilded Versailles palace and its manicured lawns — the Sun King also dabbled in theater, tapestries, gemstones and illuminated manuscripts.

The show’s more than 300 pieces reflect those varied interests. Widely dispersed during and after the 1789 French Revolution, some of them have not been back in the country since.

“Louis XIV was a world unto himself,” the exhibit’s curator, Nicolas Milovanovic, told The Associated Press. “He’s at once an inspiration for the most important artists of the 17th century, who did sometimes very different portraits of him, and a passionate lover of art who had very strong relationships with artists.”

Milovanovic said the king had well-known ties with taste-makers such as architect Louis Le Vau, landscape artist Andre Le Notre and painter Charles Le Brun, but his affinity for lesser-known Northern European painters was a more private passion.

“He had his official collection, which by tradition had to be of a splendor rivaling those of Europe’s other sovereigns, but he also had his own private collection of objects he loved, constituted according to his own taste,” said Milovanovic.

Born in 1638 to Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, Louis Dieudonne, or Louis the God-given, ascended to the throne at the tender age of five following his father’s death in 1643 — though he didn’t direct the government himself until 1661. His reign, which came after the bloody Wars of Religion, was one of relative peace and prosperity, and saw France eclipse Spain as Europe’s dominant power.

Louis XIV also presided over the flourishing of Gallic culture. He drew on the best architects and landscapers of the day to transform Versailles — his father’s hunting lodge west of Paris — into the sumptuous and imposing epicenter of European power, moving the court there in 1682. He also commissioned the continent’s top painters, sculptors and artisans to decorate the palace’s seemingly endless chambers.

Louis XIV died in 1715, at age 76, after a more than a half-century reign.

Seeing the show’s myriad portraits of the king — Louis XIV as a mythical dragon-slayer, Louis XIV in Caesar-esque Roman garb, Louis XIV in indigo robes with the royal fleur de lys insignia — it’s easy to see how he won the nickname Roi-Soleil, or Sun King.

An 1665 marble bust by Italian master Gian Lorenzo Bernini shows the king, his rough features smoothed into an idyllic mask, his eyes locked in the coolly appraising stare befitting an absolute monarch.

Still, the exhibit goes well beyond the idealized image, tracing Louis XIV’s physical evolution from a child king with a shock of blond curls to a decrepit, toothless old man. Three massive equestrian portraits, from around 1653, 1679 and 1694, show him in his gawky, towheaded teenage years, in paunchy-cheeked, barrel-chested middle age and, finally, with his features drawn by age.

A 1700 profile in painted bees’ wax and adorned with graying curls and eyelashes in real human hair shows an unshaven king with heavy jowls. The unusual relief is thought to have been made from an imprint from the face of the then-65-year-old monarch.

Another odd piece — a suit of armor in etched iron — gives the visitor another glimpse at the man behind the myth: It stands just 5 foot 6 inches (1.69 meters) high.

Milovanovic and co-curator Alexandre Maral borrowed from museums and collectors across Europe to bring some of the widely scattered pieces back to Versailles. The Queen of England lent a 1680 painting featuring workers toiling on the construction of Versailles, while Britain’s Duke of Northumberland furnished an oversized cabinet.

That buffet, inlayed with ebony from Madagascar and Mozambique, was among a dozen or so surviving pieces of furniture from Louis XIV’s Versailles. Nearly all the rest was either sold off by the Sun King’s successor, Louis XV, or dismembered by dealers as fads in interior decorating came and went. A small portion of the furniture was destroyed during the Revolution.

Paintings, drawings and jewels were scurried away in museums and libraries and survived the tumult in much greater numbers.

“Louis XIV: The Man and the King” runs at the Palais de Versailles through February 7.

On the Web:

en.chateauversailles.fr/news-/events/exhibitions/louis-xiv-the-man-and-the-king-