View of the Chateau of Versailles from the Orangery by Pierre Menant

View of the Chateau of Versailles from the Orangery 1716

hand-colored-etching, print, engraving

hand-colored-etching

baroque

print

landscape

cityscape

history-painting

engraving

This print, View of the Chateau of Versailles from the Orangery, was made by Pierre Menant using etching and engraving. These processes require considerable skill. The image is incised into a metal plate, inked, and then printed onto paper. What’s fascinating here is the relationship between the graphic techniques and the subject matter. Versailles was itself an exercise in the meticulous control of materials; think of the precisely cut stone, the carefully managed gardens, and the water features requiring constant maintenance. This print, with its own demand for careful labor, mirrors that regimentation. It is a kind of industrialization of aesthetics. Prints like this were made for a growing market, allowing those who couldn't visit Versailles to experience it, albeit in a mediated way. So, while the Chateau stood as a symbol of royal power, prints like this helped to democratize its image, making it available for consumption and appreciation by a wider audience. This artwork demonstrates how the techniques of production influence both what is represented and how it is understood.

Comments

minneapolisinstituteofart about 1 year ago

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One of Louis XIV's more blatant extravagances was the Orangery, a large conservatory dug into the slope below the south wing of palace where, sheltered from the wind, temperatures remained moderate year-round. The cost of excavating the hill, moving the mass of earth away, and constructing the long, vaulted galleries and two vast staircases framing the garden ran well over a million livres-in an era when laborers earned less than one livre per day. Although published the year after Louis XIV's death, this print is probably based on preparatory drawings executed during the Sun King's reign. It records Louis XIV's colossal achievement at Versailles: after nearly fifty years of construction, the chateau and extensive gardens are freshly completed and appear beautifully maintained. When the five-year-old Louis XV ascended to the throne in late 1715, his regent (and great-uncle) Philippe II, duc d'Orleans, brought the young monarch back to Paris and installed him in the Tuileries Palace, close to his own residence. For the next seven years Versailles was largely deserted, and it was only in 1722, just a year before Louis XV would attain his majority, that the regent returned the king and his court back to Versailles, where it would remain, remotely and fatefully, until the French Revolution.