Art Books

FRENCH LANGUAGE

The Grands Appartements are, with the Hall of Mirrors, the ceremonial space of the Palace of Versailles. The realization of the decorations took ten years, between 1671 and 1681. Upon its completion, the Grand Appartement of Louis XIV was no longer used to house the sovereign, but was the setting for court ceremonies: evenings of "Appartement", with buffets, music, games and dancing, three times a week, but also the course of major embassies received by the king.

The decorations include marble panelling, carved and gilded wooden doors and door tops, but above all arched ceilings, decorated with stucco and paintings by the best artists of the Royal Academy (Charles de La Fosse, Jean Jouvenet, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, Noël Coypel...). Charles Le Brun, the First Painter of Louis XIV, ensured the decorative unity by giving the artists and craftsmen the drawings of the structure of the ceilings, the sculpted elements and even some painted subjects.

Each room was dedicated to one of the seven "planets" known in the 17th century, and to the corresponding deity: Venus, Diana (the Moon), Mars, Mercury, Apollo (the Sun), Jupiter, Saturn. This iconography, carefully elaborated by the Petite Académie (future Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres), also included a political message, which constituted its "hidden meaning". The complexity of the iconography thus responded to the richness of the decorations.

However, the Grands Appartements had never been the subject of a monographic study. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap, by proposing, for the first time, an overall study of the decorations, a complete photographic coverage as well as the catalog raisonné of the painted decorations.

French language
213 pages

Éditions Rmn - Grand Palais / Château de Versailles