1700 words

How have political and cultural influences shaped the

architecture, landscape art and gardens of the Italian
Renaissance OR French Classicism?
Q.

Introduction
The what, where, when, who ,why and how.
Introduce the topic, highlight key points, example artworks etc.
Background
Provide historical, religious/philosophical and conceptual background to
the topic.
What information is most relevant to your argument and your examples?
Analysis
Analyse the examples in support of the argument. Describe the visual and
technical features. What is the subject or theme? How does the work
relate to the historical context in which it emerged? Explain the work in
relation to relevant socio-cultural and philosophical concepts
Conclusion.
-------------------What examples (architectural, landscape art, gardens) to use?
What is French Classicism?
Source material
Kleiner, Fred S. 2009. Gardners Art through the Ages: A Global History.
13th ed. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.

----------Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul and Jason Gaiger. 2000. Art in Theory 16481815: an anthology of changing ideas. Blackwell
p. 11
Violent upheavals in the first half of the seventeenth century an age of
crisis

p.12
The expansion of absolutism seems to have been both a consequence
and a condition of the instability. The policy of increasing centralization
and the extension of administrative control pursued by the monarchs [of
Europe] was fiercely resisted by the older aristocratic families
the damage inflicted by internal conflict and the risk of a complete
breakdown of social order also seemed to provide justification for
absolutist control. Throughout the second half of the seventeenth century
most of Europe saw the growth of monarchical power and the ever more
efficient employment of the apparatus of the state.
p.14
The second half of the seventeenth century was marked by a shift in the
cultural leadership of Europe from Italy to France the rise of France as a
continental power enabled Louis XIV and his ministers to provide
unrivalled conditions for the expansion of the arts. The Academie Royale
was a crucial instrument of this expansion.
Key figure in this transition was Nicolas Poussin
His standing as the learned painter par excellence was a powerful
motivating force to the new school of French painting.
He assimilated the achievements of the Italian Renaissance and developed
a new style of austere classicism.
p.15
The Academy had originally been founded in the name of artistic freedom
in opposition to the restrictive practices of the guilds. But under the
guiding hand of Jean-Baptiste Colbert it was indeed incorporated into the
absolutist project. As an efficiently administered medium of regulation and
royal patronage, it served increasingly to extend state control over the
arts.
p. 16
All of the participants agreed that the goal of art was the ideal imitation of
nature, that great art transcended time and that it was underpinned by
universal values.

At the heart of the doctrine classique lay the conviction that reason was
the instrument both of artistic creativity and of rational reflection. The true
imitation of nature demanded that the artist not merely copy the external
features presented by the natural world, but to penetrate through to the
essential.
In France, the dominance of rationalism and classicism resulted in a
significant counter-tendency which emphasized the importance of those
features of the work of art which seemed to escape determination by
rules: the je ne sais quoi and the quality of grace.
----------Gardners Art through the Ages
Use for the political situation in Europe background
p. 673
During the 17th and early 18th centuries, numerous geopolitical shifts
occurred in Europe as the fortunes of the individual countries waxed and
waned. Pronounced political and religious frictions resulted in widespread
unrest and warfare.
The Thirty Years War
Among the political entities vying for expanded power and authority in
Europe were the Bourbon dynasty of France and the Habsburg dynasties of
Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.
The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) marked the abandonment of a united
Christian Europe and accepted the practical realties of secular political
systems. The building of todays nation-states was emphatically
underway.
p. 691
In France, monarchical authority had been increasing for centuries,
culminating in the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1661-1715), who sought to
determine the direction of French society and culture. Although its
economy was not as expansive as that of the Dutch Republic, France
became Europes largest and most powerful country in the 17th century.
Against this backdrop the arts flourished.
Painting NICOLAS POUSSIN (1594-1665)

Romes ancient and Renaissance monuments enticed many French artists

to study there. Poussin spent most of his life in Rome, where he produced
grandly severe paintings modelled on those of Titian and Raphael. He also
carefully worked out a theoretical explanation of his method and was
ultimately responsible for establishing classical painting as an important
ingredient of 17th century French art. (see Poussins notes on painting
also available in Harrison and Wood)
Possible painting to use is Burial of Phocion, 1648. Oil on canvas, 119cm x
178cm, Louvre, Paris.

http://www.wga.hu/html_m/p/poussin/3/13phoci1.html
p. 692
Subject chosen from the literature of antiquity
The two massive bearers and the bier are starkly isolated in a great
landscape that throws them into solitary relief, eloquently expressive of
the hero abandoned in death.
Solid geometric structures
Measured light
Poussin did not intend this scene to represent a particular place and time.
It was the French artists construction of an idea of a noble landscape
The Phocion landscape is nature subordinated to a rational plan.

p. 696
LOUIS XIV
Preeminent art patron
Determined to consolidate and expand his power, Louis was a master of
political strategy and propaganda He also ensured subservience by
anchoring his rule in divine right, rendering [his] authority incontestable
Like the sun, Loouis XIV was the center of the universe.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert strove to organize art and architecture in the
service of the state. They understood well the power of art as propaganda
and the value of visual imagery for cultivating a public persona, and they
spared no pains to raise great symbols and monuments to the kings
absolute power. Louis and Colbert sought to regularize taste and establish
the classical style as the preferred French manner. The founding of the
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648 served to advance this
goal.
p. 698
Versailles
The conversion of a simple lodge into the palace of Versailles became the
greatest architectural project of the age a defining statement of French
Baroque style and an undeniable symbol of Louis XIVs power and
ambition.
--------------------------Clark, Kenneth. 1971. Civilization. London: BBC.
p. 223
For sixty years France had dominated Europe, and this had meant a rigidly
centralised, authoritarian government and a classic style. The classic
discipline which the taste of Versailles applied to all the arts can be
represented as one of the summits of European civilization le grand
siecle.
It produced a great and noble painter, Nicolas Poussin It isnt only that
Poussin was a learned artist who had studied and assimilated the poses of
antique sculpture and the pictorial inventions of Raphael; it was that he
brought to the profession of picture-making a mind stored with ancient
literature and formed by stoic philosophy.

French Classicism also produced magnificent architecture it expresses

an ideal grandeur achieved through the authoritarian state
[For example the faade of the Louvre] reflects the triumph of an
authoritarian state, and of those logical solutions that Colbert, the greatest
administrator of the seventeenth century, was imposing on politics,
economics and every department of contemporary life, including, above
all, the arts. This gives French Classical architecture a certain inhumanity.
It was the work not of craftsmen, but of wonderfully gifted civil servants
French Classicism was eminently not exportable.
--------------Clark, Kenneth. Year. Landscape Into Art. Publisher info.
On Poussin:
p. 67-68
The paintings of Poussin in which these principles are most explicitly
worked out are the heroic landscapes of about 1650, in particular those
which illustrate the story of Phocion. They show the intimate connection,
in ideal landscape, between form and content, for the stem Plutarchian
fable has produced the most rigorous of all Poussin's compositions [Pi. 64].
They are intended to symbolise the dangerous fickleness of the mob,
which had condemned to death a great leader simply because he had not
courted their favours and had the irritating faculty of being right; and
Poussin conceived that the setting of this story must be of the utmost
austerity. No beauties of light or charming distances, but a full closely knit
design, presented with uncompromising frontality.
The firmness of these great masses and the certainty with which the
eye is led back into the distance until it is arrested by the Euchdian
finality of the Temple, combine to give an impression of irresistible
logic.
------------------Wickham, Louise. 2012. Gardens in History: A Political Perspective. Oxford:
Windgather Press.
p. 1
[Wickham looks at gardens] in relation to not only how they are influenced
by the political ideas of their creators but also how the gardens

themselves provide support and legitimacy to those in government, either

overtly or indirectly.
p. 4
There has been some interesting analysis
of the use of the Versailles gardens7 both as a statement by Louis XIV of his
(and thereby French) power but also his relationship with the diplomatic world.
Louis took power back into the hands of the monarchy in 1661, following a
period where powerful commoners, as First Ministers, had run the state. This
coincided almost exactly with his construction of the gardens at Versailles that
Mukerji says was a demonstration not only of French military engineering and
style but also Louis control over the land and his people. Louis used the gardens
as an indicator of the importance (or otherwise!) of his foreign visitors. The
greatest honour was for the King himself to show you round, although many
were with official guides but with directions from the king on the prescribed
route. However if no tour at all was offered, as happened to the delegation from
Moscow in 1687 (Berger and Hedin 2008, 71) this was seen as a snub.
p. 87
The gardens at Versailles became the model that other aspiring political
leaders in Western Europe, including non-royals, would use when planning
their estates,
p. 88
It was not just about the sheer size and the overall design, it was how Louis
used these gardens politically, which is interesting. In addition to the diplomatic
tours, it is the use of the garden as a place of symbolism and spectacle that is also
important. As Mukerji (1997, 2) points out: Versailles was a model of material
domination of nature that fairly shouted its excessive claims about the strength
of France [and was] testimony to the greatness of the monarch who built
[it]
p. 90
Louis XIV was to take all these strands of the
garden as theatre or spectacle, as territorial power, as symbol and as centre for
diplomacy in his master creation at Versailles a hundred years later.
p. 96
The rise of Richelieu marked a trend that was to continue throughout
the first half of the seventeenth century, where the kings relied on ministers
rather than the traditional nobility. The long civil wars of the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries had weakened the latters position as successive
kings mistrusted them and their motives. With the ministers and officials in control of state
policy, it was they who became powerful and rich through
sales of hereditary offices and the collection of taxes
p. 101
Until 1680, the kings principal residence was Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Versailles, then under construction, occasionally welcomed the Court. The

occasions of these visits and the ftes meant that continual novelty was
demanded. The pace of change increased once Louis and the court lived there
permanently. As a showcase for the le Roi Soleil (The Sun King), the iconographic
programme was as important as the overall size and design. This encompassed
not only the key architectural features including the statues but also the use of
plant material particularly flowers. The honoured guests to the garden would
understand the illusions made. Whereas many parts of interior of the chteau of
Versailles were specifically dedicated to the glory of Louis XIV and the French
monarchy, there are only ever two images of him9 in the gardens. Instead
he was alluded to through mythology and allegory. Berger (1985, 64) thinks
that by doing this, the creators of Versailles simply followed the traditions
of Renaissance Baroque residences, in which the park was conceived of as an idyllic, pastoral
setting for the eternal Antique presences: the pagan deities, the
personified forces of nature, and the personae of ancient mythology.
p. 102
Botanic gardens or a collection of particular plants was a way of demonstrating
power and wealth of the sovereign and Louis XIV was no exception. As
important as the hard landscaping were the flowers in the gardens of both the
secondary palaces of Marly and the Trianon within the wider Versailles estate.
He maintained the most spectacular displays of flowers that early modern
Europe had yet seen, and he did so during the years when flowers were at the
zenith of their popularity and fashionability in elite circles (Hyde 2005, 169).
These were mainly not for general view and the most precious flowers were in
private areas reserved exclusively for the king and those he chose to invite there.
Just as the statues and fountains had symbolic value, so too did these flowers
which represented not only the obvious abundance and fertility, but also the
nature of his reign as a time of peace and prosperity.
p. 103
Mukerji (2001) looks at another political aspect of the gardens of Versailles
in the use of parterres de broderie. She believes (2001, 249) that to dress the
land in [this] French style [gave] it a political identity. This dressing of
the countryside was a form of political address, which claimed France to be a
natural as well as cultural unit, designed both for political unity and greatness.
Olivier de Serres in his book of 1611, Le Theatre dagriculture et mesnages de
champs, recommended that by landowners maximising the productive ability of
their land, the economic and political well-being of the whole population would
benefit. One way he advocated was the cultivation of mulberry trees for the
raising of silkworms for the silk industry. Thus early on, there was a connection
between textiles and gardening as the complex designs of the parterres mirrored
the woven textiles that were providing a significant part to the growth of French
national wealth. By the time the parterres were being installed at Versailles, they
had taken on a greater role. Using large collections of imported bulbs and other
rare flowering plants, they showed not only superior (that is French) taste and
the latest trends in design but also French strength in international trade and
horticultural practice (Mukerji 2001, 253). France (and by implication Louis as
absolute ruler) was pre-eminent and the gardens were re-enforcing this point.
p. 105

Louis XIV started work on the

gardens, despite the opposition of Colbert, his Finance Minister, who thought
that he should concentrate on the existing royal residences. Louis though
wanted Versailles as it had resonance as a purely Bourbon creation
As Mukerji (1997, 2) points out: the gardens [of Versailles] were not
just marvels to transfix the viewer; they were laboratories for and demonstrations
of French capacities to use the countryside as a political resource for power.
Representing France itself (and by implication, Louis as absolute monarch),
the gardens at Versailles therefore had to keep changing to show that France
was still the pre-eminent nation.
p. 108
Creating a coherent design (Figure
4.13) was not easy but the spreading geometry of landscaped circles, squares,
and intersecting walks all centred on the main axis with several transversal
lines provided the basic ordering devices which enabled Le Ntre to maintain
unity and continuity in the face of unpredictable expansion
The theme of the Sun King continued with the construction of the Bassin de
Latone, which was designed by Le Ntre and sculpted by Gaspard and Balthazar
Marsy (Figure 4.14). Built between 1668 and 1670, the fountain depicts a tale
from Ovids Metamorphoses. Latona and her children, Apollo and Diana, are not
allowed to drink from a pond belonging to some Lycian peasants and further
indignity is heaped on the gods as mud is thrown at them. An appeal to Zeus results in the Lycians
being turned into frogs. This mythological episode was
chosen as a deliberate reference to the civil war known as the Fronde, in the first
part of Louis reign. The word fronde means slingshot, as this was the favoured
weapon of the rebels, who were therefore being compared to the mud-slinging
Lycians in the statue. The Dragon Fountain, finished in 1668, also referred to
Louis triumph over the rebellious Frondes (Thompson 2006, 147). It represents
the Python, a large snake killed by Apollo.

-----------------Schama, Simon. 1996. Landscape and memory. New York: Vintage Books.
p. 339
The same mathematics that was needed in the perfection of siege artillery
and fortifications was applied to the exact construction of space within a garden.
42 Moreover, Etienne Binet, writing in 1629, explicitly compared the creator
of such gardens to a "little god. "43 But it was only absolutist monarchs in
the Baroque who were supposed to describe themselves as earthly deities. So it
may have been for his usurpation of the roles of both landscape marshal and
hydraulic muse that Fouquet paid such a heavy price.
And
given the king's absolutist temperament, the element of caprice, so strongly
felt at Vaux, was made strictly subject to the prospects of grandeur. Even
before the first chateau was built by Louis Le Vau, the park was made the setting
for entertainments that catered to the king's hunger for self-aggrandizement.
Whether they were ostensibly performed in honor of military victories,
the Icing's latest mistress, or both, they used bodies of water as theatrical platforms
on which spectacles that flattered his omnipotence could be performed.
From the outset, the myth of Apollo, as well as the absolutist gaze, determined
much of the design of the park and its waters. Where the axis of the allee
at Vaux connected the stone Caesars with the river-gods reclining in the grotto, at Versailles the line of
inspection was moved east-west, in keeping with the
progress of the sw1. From the uppermost terrace of the garden side of the
palace Louis could look down a flight of stone steps at a fountain group that
bore immediate witness to the divinely royal power over the waters.

THE FOUNTAIN of LATONA at Versailles

And the fountain of Apollo
p. 340
What is, in any case, an unparalleled moment in amphibian myth was, for
Louis XIV, also history: history political and history fanlliiar. For tl1e fountain
alluded to tl1e eviction of Anne of Austria and her two children, Louis and
Philippe, at the time of the uprising of the Parisian Fronde. And whether or not
the king actually disliked the capital as much as conventional histories claim,
there is no doubt that the sovereign position of tl1e fountain of Latona, directly
beneath the chateau and pointing down tl1e grande allee) was a royal retort, a
proclamation of the realm's metamorphosis from anarchy to order.44 At the end
of the allee is tl1e equally extraordinary fountain of Apollo, where the gilded
sun-god can be seen rising from the waters at the beginning of the day. Thus
tl1e two fountain groups-Latona and Apollo-were in poetic and historical
correspondence with each otl1er, adversity and ascendancy; back and fortl1
down tl1e line of light and water.
p. 343
There was a wealth of commercial, as well as military, associations afloat on
the grand canal ofVersailles. At the same time that the great pile of the palace
was growing, royal engineers were cutting their way through ranges of hills to
create a spectacular network of royal canals in the Midi and in Burgw1dy. Their
purpose, of course, was to provide the infrastructure necessary for the kind of
commercial revolution that Colbert had envisioned as necessary if absolutist
France was to prevail over the greatest canal power of the world: the Dutch
republic. But the canal, along with the new generation of aqueducts, like the
aqueduct of Maintenton, was the perfect expression of absolutist control over
the waters: linear, obedient, and free from the unpredictable ebbs and flows of
both history and geography. It was a true highway even if, in the end, it went
(like absolutist France) nowhere.