At the Metropolitan, the glory that was 17th century France
Some exhibitions cannot be done by the fainthearted; they can only be developed by great museums at their full organizational stretch. They alter the way art history is read, and "France in the Golden Age," which opened last month at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of these uncommon and persuasive events. It consists of 124 paintings by 17th century French artists, all culled from American collections. Some of them are among the household gods of the West, like Nicolas Poussin or Georges de La Tour; others, like Laurent de La Hyre or the extraordinary still-life painter Sebastien Stoskopff, are familiar only to specialists. The show was at the Grand Palais in Paris last winter, and will go to the Art Institute of Chicago this fall. It is the climax of a long re-evaluation of this period in French painting, carried out by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Its catalogue, by Pierre Rosenberg, conservator of paintings at the Louvre, is a model of lyrical scholarly enthusiasm—as is its long prefatory essay by the historian Marc Fumaroli.
The French still call the 17th century le grand siècle. During it, French culture reinvented itself, regaining the strength (if not the spirituality) it had in the Middle Ages. From the centralization of state power to the design of gardens, from the cult of literary "genius" to the rationalization of economic policy, its social tissue dilated with confidence. France's idea of itself as a nation bound by collective myths and a shared destiny had been precarious: it was rent by feudal squabbles, foreign invasion and civil war. Culturally, Paris in 1600 was little more than a colony of Italy; the Frenchman traveling south was made painfully aware that he came from a second-class power. "We are indeed the laughing stock of everybody, and none will take pity on us," Poussin morosely wrote from Rome in 1649. "We are compared to the Neapolitans and shall be treated as they were."
But the symbol and instrument of change was crowned at Reims five years later—the Sun King, Louis XIV, whose joining of a more than Roman gravitas to an insatiable desire for glory made him the central motif of French social myth and, so, of French culture. He was hailed as the new Caesar Augustus, the bringer of a literal "golden age" of peace and wealth. To celebrate this bewigged divinity, the right language was one of ideal form, majestic elocution and classical certainty: the diction of Imperial Rome brought up to date. This did not, of course, develop overnight, for great artists who bring such language do not simply materialize like good waiters when a monarch snaps his fingers. But by any standards, the cultural efflorescence around Louis XIV was astounding—among dramatists, Corneille, Racine and Molière; among writers, La Rochefoucauld and La Fontaine; such architects as Mansart, Perrault and Le Vau; the garden-designer Lenôtre, whose monument is the parks and parterres of Versailles. Louis XIV's ministers also set about creating or strengthening the institutions of official French culture, meant to raise art, writing and thought to a new level of prestige: the French Academy for literature, the Comédie Française for drama, the Royal Academy for painters and sculptors and the Academy of Sciences.