Paraphrases artistiques ou contre-images politiques ? Les empereurs et les rois de France dans des gravures parallèles

• Main Author: Friedrich Polleross
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles 2018-04-01
• Series: Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles
• Subjects: portrait; Habsburg; engraving; 17th century; war of images; cultural transfer
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/14924

In seventeenth-century engravings we can find portraits of the Habsburgs and the kings of France in very similar compositions. We can see here artistic influences, but also a political message in the context of the two rival European powers. The project of Antoine de Laval for the Petite Galerie du Louvre in 1600 was a paraphrase of the Imagines Gentis Austriacae by Francesco Terzio. In 1593 Antonio Tempesta created an equestrian portrait of Henry IV; ten years later it was taken up by Aegidius Sadeler for a portrait of Rudolph II. In 1614 the same artist engraved an allegorical portrait of Emperor Matthias, and now it was Crispijn de Passe II who repeated the composition for a portrait of Louis XIII. In the context of the marriages of 1615, the Spanish symbolism was transferred to the French royal iconography: an engraving by Pierre Firens presents the two couples above the four parts of the world. In 1625 De Passe used the motif to honour Louis XIII on the title page of Les États, empires, royaumes et principautés du Monde. When in 1628 Matthias Merian made a title page for a new edition of Sebastian Münster’s “cosmography” he copied the composition, but put the emperor instead of the French king. The portrait of Louis XIII by Jeremias Falck in 1643 was reprised in 1653 by Jacob von Sandrart for a portrait of Ferdinand III. In 1687 a Viennese engraver paraphrased the equestrian portrait of Louis XIV for the thesis of Jacques-Nicolas Colbert by Charles Le Brun for a Hungarian thesis honouring the emperor. The most important theme in the war of images was the solar symbolism, used by, among others, Claude-François Menestrier in 1689 in his Histoire du Roy Louis le Grand Par les Medailles …. Ten years later an Austrian Jesuit returned to this print with Leopold I in Louis’s stead. In 1697 the publisher Henri Bonnart produced an engraving of the Grand Dauphin with a small portrait of his wife. Around 1699 the artist again used the plate, or at least the composition, for a portrait of the Roman king, Joseph I with a small portrait of his wife.