Versailles treasures symbols of pomp and circumstance

The exhibition Versailles: Treasures from the Palace uses the gardens to illustrate the palace’s creative vitality.

The opulent Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

Versailles is perhaps the biggest royal palace in the world, and certainly the most famous. With its innumerable halls and rooms, painted ceilings, immense gardens and wealth of statuary, fountains and other ornaments, it must seem to most visitors to represent the height of indulgence. Indeed the most famous anecdote connected with Versailles in the popular imagination concerns Marie-Antoinette’s dismissive remark about the hungry populace, “Let them eat cake” — actually an approximate translation of “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, which is wittier if no less heartless.

Its function, however, was primarily a political one: it was an essential part of the image, one can almost say the performance, of the post-feudal model of absolute monarchy. Within this broader context, even the celebration of the Sun King was never really about an individual but about the living personification of the state.

To understand the origin of both palace and political model we have to consider the history of France over the previous century or more. In the late Middle Ages, France had struggled to achieve what we now consider as its natural territory; even in the 16th century, feudal princes remained powerful figures. The wars of religion tore the country apart in the second half of that century, and were finally settled only when a Protestant king, Henri of Navarre, assumed the throne of France, converted to Catholicism and issued the Edict of Nantes guaranteeing the rights of Protestants.

Henri IV was murdered by a Catholic fanatic in 1610, and France was ruled for a time by the queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, until her son Louis XIII was old enough to assume the throne, although the state was effectively controlled by his powerful prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who ruthlessly pursued a policy of centralisation; Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844) and its sequels are set in this period and the ensuing decades.

Louis’s death in 1643 resulted in a second regency again nominally headed by a queen mother — Anne of Austria — while the country was in reality governed by Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Mazarin. In the relative power vacuum of an interregnum, the interest groups opposed to the new model of centralisation and absolutism — from nobles to upper middle class — took turns to rebel and to foster instability.

When Mazarin died in 1661, the young Louis XIV announced his decision to govern personally: in other words, not to rely on a prime minister. And despite the initial scepticism of his courtiers, he turned out to be an extremely hardworking monarch who chaired daily cabinet meetings. He did, however, have the benefit of an extraordinarily capable first secretary in Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who understood how to co-ordinate all aspects of political and economic life with a greater efficiency than had ever been seen in France.

The Sun King, however, was the living embodiment of the new state, and Versailles became the symbol of his rule. Even so it is essential to remember that the core of the palace existed before his time, and that its enlargement, eventually to colossal proportions, took place in two phases, which correspond to the early and late periods of Louis’s rule.

Versailles had originally been a relatively modest hunting lodge built in the time of Louis XIII, and from 1662 to 1670 Louis XIV had it extended by building a so-called envelope around the original structure, which was carefully preserved and remains visible today as the Cour de Marbre. Louis was perhaps originally drawn to Versailles because it was an escape from Paris and a retreat that he visited with his young mistress, but by the time the first extensions were completed, he must have realised its potential as a place to demonstrate the greatness of the monarchy through extravagant celebrations and festivals of theatre and music.

More and more, Versailles served to cement the power of the absolute monarchy by forcing all the formerly fractious princes and nobles to become party animals, kept busy with entertainments and managed through the judicious distribution of royal favour. Louis’s life at Versailles became elaborately formal, a kind of fulltime theatrical production, but he was adept at the timely use of informality and intimacy to keep the courtiers in the palm of his hand.

Versailles was always about power, but it became even more explicitly the symbol of the absolutist state after the king reached the zenith of his power with the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678. After that the palace was vastly enlarged to become the seat of government and almost a separate capital city, independent of Paris. This was also the time at which the great terrace facing the gardens, which gave the garden facade a handsome shape in Le Vau’s original design, was filled in to become the Hall of Mirrors.

The Hall of Mirrors was decorated with ceiling paintings narrating the career of the Sun King — it was unusual for such a program to be so overtly political — and the addition of a Salon of Peace and a Salon of War at either end underlined the message. In hindsight we can see that by now the greatest political and cultural achievements of the Sun King’s reign were behind him: the repression of the Protestants and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, just after the completion of the Hall of Mirrors, represented the beginning of a series of terrible and destructive wars that overshadowed the last years of Louis’s reign until his death in 1715.

Marble bust of the Sun King by Jean Varin, from the exhibition Versailles: Treasures from the Palace.

But none of this is apparent in the opulent exhibition that comes to the National Gallery from the Museum of Versailles. We are instead struck first by images that recall the grandeur of the Sun King — the marble bust by Jean Varin surrounded by bronze casts of antique works — and the splendour of the palace.

Among the most important objects from this period are a magnificent Savonnerie carpet and two great tapestries produced by the Gobelins factory, which testify to Colbert’s policy of encouraging arts and industries and promoting state monopolies.

One of these tapestries alludes directly to Louis’s policy of enforcing recognition of his status as a great monarch: the papal legate and nephew of the pope comes in person to apologise for an incident in which the French ambassador’s page was murdered by one of the pope’s Corsican guards. The other, based on a design by the king’s official artist Charles Le Brun, recalls the king’s personal visit, in the company of Colbert, to the Gobelins factory, of which Le Brun was also the director.

A tapestry from the Gobelins factory, from the exhibition Versailles: Treasures from the Palace.

The most original aspect of the exhibition, however, uses the gardens to illustrate the energy and creative vitality that went into the realisation of the palace complex.

One section introduces us to the maze that was created early in the history of the gardens, filled with sculpted animal figures in lead evoking the recently published first series of The Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1668). These are remarkably inventive, lively beasts, presumably cast and then carved, since lead is such a soft and malleable metal. But they also represent ­aspects of aesthetic expression that we do not usually associate with Versailles, where everything was ruled by a rhetoric of monarchical celebration.

Still more impressive is the section devoted to the fountains that were and remain one of the most prominent features of the magnificent formal gardens at Versailles. These are not things that are easily transported for an ­exhibition, but here the experience of one of the fountains is ingeniously reproduced using a large carved figure group and a film and sound installation all around, combined with ­explanatory sections that help the viewer understand why the fountains were so great an achievement.

The whole extension of Versailles was enormously difficult from an engineering point of view and correspondingly expensive because of the topography of the site, but the greatest difficulty of all was in supplying enough water, under sufficient pressure, to make the fountains work. Over the years, miracles of hydraulic engineering were achieved in trying to solve these problems, but the water supply could never keep up with the demand for ever more fountains, and garden staff had to turn off one fountain before turning on another, to maintain water pressure; the exhibition includes some of the keys that were used for this purpose.

Much of the show is devoted to Versailles after the death of the Sun King and under his successors Louis XV and the unfortunate Louis XVI, who was executed during the French Revolution. Life in the palace changed considerably under these two monarchs. Almost the whole of Louis XIV’s life, from waking in the morning to retiring at night, was acted out in public before a large audience. At dinner, for example, he alone sat in a chair with a back, while chosen guests shared his table seated on stools, and a large crowd stood and watched. Under Louis XV this ceremonial was found intolerable and largely abolished; henceforth the king could have dinner in a relatively small dining room with a small group of comfortably seated guests.

Hence from this period we have many more examples of the fine furniture, as well as china and other things that evoke the quality of the elegant and much more relaxed life in the 18th-century palace. There are notably a number of fine portraits from this period, including the work of artists such as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Carle Van Loo.

In the later decades of the century, however, the isolation of the court at Versailles exacerbated both a real disconnection from the serious questions of contemporary society and the impression of indifference on the part of a court living in a bubble of its own making. Marie-Antoinette’s fantasy village and toy dairy, although also evidence of a proto-romantic love of nature and the simple life, ended up being symbols self-indulgence and disconnection from urgent ­social realities.

In the end Louis XVI, an amiable man of simple tastes whose greatest pleasure was doing woodwork in his shed, paid for all the follies of the court and the stubborn refusal to embrace reforms on the British model. The last work in the exhibition shows the king writing his will, but the penultimate one is the important drawing by Jacques-Louis David of the Tennis Court Oath — when the members of the newly self-proclaimed National Assembly vowed not to end their sitting until reform had been achieved — a work intended to become a painting but never finished because the bloody Terror that followed the revolution successively killed off so many of the leading figures in the composition.

Versailles: Treasures from the Palace, National Gallery of Australia, until April 17.