Images du pouvoir et pouvoir de l’image. Les ornements gravés d’Antoine Dieu et Jean Audran en marge du poème sur le dôme royal des Invalides (1702)
Abstract
In the wake of the prestige books of the mid-17th century, Pierre de Bellocq's poem dedicated to the royal church of Les Invalides took on the finery of a richly illustrated luxury publication. It was published in folio format by Michel Brunet in Paris in 1702, while Pierre Lepautre (1652-1716) directed the production of the copperplate ornaments, whose invention we attribute to Antoine Dieu (1662?-1727) and the engravings to Jean Audran (1667-1756).Taking a step aside from the text, the ambition is to grasp how the images contextualise the publication. While faithfully illustrating the poem, they echo other forms of representation, especially contemporary ephemeral settings, with which they share the same visual repertoire. More than a literary object, the poem at the Invalides is approached as a cultural object, a marker of an era.Such historiated ornaments as vignettes, grey and capital letters, are part of the history of figure book, halfway between the first prestigious books of the 1640s and the blossoming of illustrated book in the following century, ensuring continuity with the work of François Chauveau and Sébastien Leclerc, and before the most famous works of Cochin, followed by Charles Eisen and Moreau le Jeune.
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