Crowning Glories

Crowning Glories integrates Louis XIVs propaganda campaigns, the transmission of Northern art into France, and the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century three historical touchstones to examine what it would have meant for Frances elite to experience the arts in France simultaneously with Netherlandish realist painting. In an expansive study of cultural life under the Sun King, Harriet Stone considers the monarchys elaborate palace decors, the courts official records, and the classical theatre alongside Northern images of daily life in private homes, urban markets, and country fields. Stone argues that Netherlandish art assumes an unobtrusive yet, for the history of ideas, surprisingly dramatic role within the flourishing of the arts, both visual and textual, in France during Louis XIVs reign. Netherlandish realist art represented thinking about knowledge that challenged the monarchys hold on the French imagination, and its efforts to impose the kings portrait as an ideal and proof of his authority. As objects appreciated for their aesthetic and market value, Northern realist paintings assumed an uncontroversial place in French royal and elite collections. Flemish and Dutch still lifes, genre paintings, and cityscapes, however, were not merely accoutrements of power, acquisitions made by those with influence and money. Crowning Glories reveals how the empirical orientation of Netherlandish realism exposed French court society to a radically different mode of thought, one that would gain full expression in the Encyclopdie of Diderot and dAlembert.