Projet de feu d'artifice tiré à Versailles, le 15 mai 1771
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Under the Ancien Régime, fireworks were part of the world of festivities : celebrations of royal births and marriages, coronations, peace treaties and diplomatic visits.
An essentially ephemeral art form, whose completion goes hand in hand with destruction, they are known from abundant preserved documentation...
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Under the Ancien Régime, fireworks were part of the world of festivities : celebrations of royal births and marriages, coronations, peace treaties and diplomatic visits.
An essentially ephemeral art form, whose completion goes hand in hand with destruction, they are known from abundant preserved documentation linked to the festivities : engravings and drawings, manuscripts and illustrated books ; with the exception that drawings of fireworks are extremely rare !
In 1770, 1771 and 1773, three weddings in France (Versailles) - of the Dauphin, future King Louis XVI, and his brothers, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d'Artois - marked the apogee of this very special art form.
The Musée du Louvre has preserved an exceptional record of the fireworks staged for the Count de Provence's wedding in 1771 : an album of drawings made under the guidance of Morel, Torré and Seguin, the pyrotechnicians in charge of the fireworks.
For the first time, the pyrotechnic spectacle is depicted in each of its ''tableaux'', with all their effects and figures, including two radically new "feux": a grand palace created using only "blue fire", and a portrait of the king deemed to be very lifelike, albeit drawn in lights alone !
Here, pyrotechnicians rival and surpass painters. Using fixed and moving lights and a whole array of wicks, their fireworks and illumination pieces now make up the whole show, making it unnecessary to commission the traditional fixed sets from the painters and architects of the Administration des Menus Plaisirs.
Now, for the first time, the entire notebook has been reproduced to actual scale and studied in detail, so that readers and enthusiasts can experience some of the splendor of these festivities, whose bonfires were among the most expensive of the Ancien Régime: fires that we know were particularly appreciated by Louis XV, after whose death such nocturnal enchantments were never seen again.
French language
Facsimile notebook 68 pages + Booklet 40 pages, boxset.
Officina Libraria / Louvre éditions Co-publishers
Collection Carnets et albums. Dessins du musée du Louvre, n° 6
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