The Mistresses of Louis XIV

or 'Les Maîtresses de Louis XIV'.

It is the name of a perfume by Romea d'Ameor.

IRANIAN GALBANUM BLACKCURRANT-MELON
CLOVE
CRUSHED LEAFY NOTES
FLAME LILY
JASMINE-ROSE-NARCISSUS
JASMINE-LILY OF THE VALLEY
IRIS
WOODLAND AND FOREST NOTES
NECTARINE
AMBER-MUSC
...

It takes all this to get the feeling you're a XVIIth-century beauty !

Grands Motets for Louis XIV

Grands Motets pour Louis XIV
by Le Chœur de Chambre de Namur and Les Agrémens under Guy Van Waas.

The concert will take place at the Chapelle Royale de Versailles on Sunday November 28 2010 - 5:30pm (French time) and will be broadcast live on Arte Live Web

Louis Quatorze - Louis XIV

Louis XIV is the theme of the Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht 2010 which is starting today...

"Ten days of French Baroque music in Utrecht's concert halls and churches. Dozens of concerts, lectures, workshops and a symposium* place a spotlight on the Grand Siècle"...

* a three-day symposium titled French Baroque Gesture 1675-1800, with Graham Sadler speaking on a subject dear to my heart : "Reconstructing the union of music, movement and gesture in the ballets figurés of two Rameau-Cahusac operas"...

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Update :

Reviews of the concerts on Johan Van Veen's excellent Musica Dei Donum.

Lully - 'Bellerophon' World Premiere

Bellérophon (1679), stage decoration by Carlo Vigarani

The world premiere of Lully's Bellerophon will take place in July during the Festival de Beaune, under the baton of Christophe Rousset.

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The author of the libretto was Thomas (de Lisle) Corneille who, in that occasion, learned how hard it was to write an opera, especially an opera for Lully. At that time, Philippe Quinault, Lully's favourite librettist, was in exile because of Madame de Montespan's reaction to their opera Isis. She had got him banned from the court because she thought he had voluntarily ridiculed her by portraying her as the jealous and vindictive Juno.

Lecerf de la Vieville wrote about Corneille's experience : "Lully was constantly driving him to desesperation. For a 500- or 600-verse play, monsieur de Lisle had to write 2000 verses..." Corneille later stated that he'd rather write ten tragedies than an opera.

Actually, Corneille couldn't manage to write the libretto on his own and asked Fontelle and Boileau for their help. It took three authors, time, and lots of arguments with Lully to replace Quinault.

The libretto was good, but, after that difficult experience, and pressured by Lully, the king found wiser to get Quinault back for the next productions.

Bellerophon was performed for the first time at the Palais Royal (Paris), on January 31, 1679, and met with huge success.

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Other Lully related program in Beaune : L'exotisme à la Cour de Louis XIV (Exoticism at the Court of Louis XIV), arias and musics by Lully, Cavalli & Moulinie, performed by Le Poeme Harmonique under Vincent Dumestre.

Magic Lantern

Athanasius Kircher's Magic Lantern

(Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae)

A current exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française is dedicated to magic lanterns and painted films. It's a very enriching time travel to the origins of the motion picture.

There is funny anecdote about Christiaan Huygens. He invented his magic lantern as part of his experiments on optics but he was not interested in its entertaining potential. Unlike him, his father Constantin was enthusiastic about it and, in 1662, asked his son to send him a magic lantern to give a show to Louis XIV and his court. Christiaan felt horrified. He thought that having his name associated with that kind of show would ruin his reputation of respectable scientist, and he didn't want his father to condescend to the role of fair entertainer. As he couldn't refuse the lantern, he sent the instrument but asked his brother to take off a lens to make sure it wouldn't work. He was hoping that by the time his father could figure out how to fix the problem he would have changed his mind about the show. And that was what happened. Constantin Huygens never showed the magic lantern to Louis XIV.

A few years later, in 1666, Christiaan Huygens, invited by Colbert, became a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences.

Lanterne magique et film peint - 400 ans de cinéma

Paris, Cinémathèque Française, October 14, 2009 - March 28, 2010

Torino, Venaria Reale, October 12 2010 - January 09, 2011

laternamagica

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Off topic, but Proust is one of my favourite writers...

On the laternamagica site, there is a Lapierre series of slides titled 'Genevieve de Brabant'. I think that it is likely to be the series Proust described in In Search of Lost Time.

'The French Parnassus' at the MET

I named a Yahoo! group and my blog after that work.
I'll give the story of the project and a complete description of the monument in a next post.

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The French Parnassus
Louis Garnier (ca. 1638–Paris, 1728);
Medallions by Simon Curé (ca. 1680–Paris, 1734);
Later additions by Augustin Pajou (Paris, 1730–Paris, 1809)Paris, 1718–1721; Pajou additions, 1762 and 1777
Bronze group; 102 3/8 x 92 1/2 x 90 9/16 in. (260 x 235 x 230 cm)
Versailles, Musée National de Versailles, MV 6023

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Exhibition :
Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution
February 24, 2009–May 24, 2009
MET - Special Exhibition Galleries, 1st floor

Portraits of Louis XIV & the Royal Family

Louis XIV at various ages

Found on Gallica, an artwork by Antoine Benoist (1632-1717), showing Louis XIV at the age of 5, 10, 16, 22, 28, 34, 40, 46, 54 & 59.

The Royal Family

Louis XIV (at the age of 64) ; Louis, dauphin (23) ; Maria Anna of Bavaria, Dauphine (24) ; Louis, duc de Bourgogne (22) ; Marie Adélaïde, duchesse de Bourgogne (19) ; Philippe, duc d'Anjou (19) ; Charles duc de Berry (18) ; Louis XIII (15?) ; Maria Teresa of Austria (22?) ; Anna of Austria (63).

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Gallica dated the works from the years 1690.

Louis XIV - YSL Sale (1)

The big event which took place in the Grand Palais (Paris) last week was the Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Berge Sale.
They called it the auction of the century because it broke many records - among others it realized €373, 935, 500, a world record auction for a private collection.

There are many reasons to talk about it, but I have two, notably the one you can see above : a small portrait box (7,2 cm) of Louis XIV (ca. 1680), with a portrait by Jean I Petitot, adorned with 78 diamonds set by Pierre or Laurent Le Tessier de Montarsy.

Sold for €481,000, and the Louvre Museum used their right to pre-empt it, so it's where you'll see it in the future.

Cavalli - Ercole Amante

Ercole... (sigh...)

Ercole Amante staged by David Alden,
or how to turn a drama into a buffoonery
Amsterdam, January 2009

It's obvious the contemporary stage directors feel ill at ease when it comes to staging ancient operas. If they can read the libretto and have a brain, it's the only way I can explain their insistence in turning all the dramas into lousy comedies. As Bergson theorised it, laughter is most of the time a sign of embarrassment rather than of fun.

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Ercole Amante was commissionned by Mazarin to celebrate the mariage of Louis XIV and Maria Teresa of Austria, and was first performed on February 7, 1662, in the new salle des Machines built in the Tuileries. The ballet, Hercule amoureux, performed between the acts to please the French public, was Lully's first great success.

Symposium in Basel

Musique et Instruments de musique de la Grande Ecurie & des Gardes Suisses à la Cour de France sous Louis XIV et Louis XV

March 18 - 19, 2009
Musik Museum,
Basle, Im Lohnhof 9, Roter Saal
Languages : French / German

***

Chefs du projet : Thomas Drescher, Thilo Hirsch
Partenaires : Martin Kirnbauer (Musée de la Musique, Bâle), Florence Gétreau (Paris-IRPMF)
Conferenciers : Katharina Andres (Bâle), Boaz Berney (Jaffa), Jürg Buchwalder (Bâle), Walter Büchler (Bâle), Sarah van Cornewal (Bâle), Olivier Cottet (Le Bois des prés), Jean Duron (Paris), Thilo Hirsch (Bâle), Johanne Maitre (Guebwiller), Anne Piejus (Paris), Vincent Robin (Saint Denis)

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Concert
March 19, 2009 - 8:15 pm
Leonhardskirche, Basle

Musique de la Grande Ecurie & des Gardes Suisses
Works by J.-B. Lully, A. Philidor, L. Couperin, M.P. Montéclair, J.-B. Prin, . Corrette btw others.

Ensemble arcimboldo, Basle
Ensemble des trompettes de la SCB
Direction : Thilo Hirsch

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Details and information :
PDF Français - PDF German

scb-basel - rimab - musikmuseum

Pietà

The 17th-century Pietà belongs to a small church in Bourgogne. As the painting was damaged they wanted to have it repaired and cleaned. The conservator noticed that on both sides some areas had been repainted. The X-rays revealed the hidden portrait of Anna of Austria and her two sons, Louis XIV and Monsieur. In spite of the bad state of the painting, they decided to restore the painting to its 17th-century state.

Alexandre et Louis XIV : tissages de gloire...

.... is the title of the exhibition at the Galerie des Gobelins in Paris showing the 11 tapestries dedicaded to the life of Alexander the Great. It was designed by Le Brun in the years 1660-1673 to glorify Louis XIV.
The exhibition is staged and also shows period furniture. The little box trees refer to the way the series was introduced to Louis XIV in 1677 : hanged on the external façade of the château de Versailles.

It's the first time the whole ensemble is shown since the end of the Ancien Régime.

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Mobilier National - Galerie des Gobelins
42, avenue des Gobelins, Paris XIII
http://www.mobiliernational-culture.gouv.fr/

The exhibition closes on March 1st.

Rose de Paris

A gouache designed by Pascal Monney for Herbert Horovitz showing a reconstitution of Louis XV's Great Golden Fleece, designed in 1749.

The big blue heartshaped diamond has a long history. It was brought from India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1668, and purchased by Louis XIV who had it cut in 1671, in that extraordinary and difficult symmetry based on number 7 with a radiant sun in the middle, called "Rose de Paris". It became the second biggest diamond in the king's collection ; the first one being the Sancy which belongs now in to the Musée du Louvre.

During the French Revolution, in 1792, the jewels of the Crown were stolen. Some of the stolen pieces were found, but the 'rose de Paris' was still missing, until...

In 2007, François Farges from the Museum d'Histoire Naturel de Paris and his team found a lead copy of the "rose de Paris " in the reserve of the museum. For the first time it was possible to know precisely how big the stone was and its precise shape. At seeing it, Farges had the intuition that maybe the "Hope diamond", a smaller blue diamond, belonging to the Smithsonian Institute, and that appeared a few years after the Jewels of the Crown had been stolen, was the "Rose", reworked and made impossible to be recognized and claimed by France.
After some calculations and computer modelizations, which detail was published in the Revue de Gemmologie, François Farges came to the conclusion that the Hope and the "Rose de Paris" are the same stone.

This red stone, a spinel, which belonged to Marguerite de Foix, and then to her daughter, Anne de Bretagne (1477-1514) who became queen of France and brought it to the Crown. Under Louis XV the stone was cut in the shape of a draco and included to the Great Goldren Fleece.


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Farges F., Sucher S., Horovitz H. and Fourcault J-M., "Deux découvertes majeures autour du 'diamant bleu' de la Couronne, Revue de Gemmologie, volume 165, pp. 17-24, 2008.