L’importation du marbre de Carrare à la cour de Louis XIV

Abstract

The difficulty of procuring statuary marble was a recurrent problem for sculpture, except obviously in Italy, site of the quarries, in particular those of Carrara. France had attempted exploiting the marble of the Pyrenees with difficulty; it had a bad reputation with sculptors. The conditions of extraction, of transport and the trade of Carrara marble in France under the reign of Louis XIV are presented here.The period between around 1600–62 was the first that saw competition between two rival groups, one sent by Fouquet, made up of Girardin and Pierre Puget, and that of Colbert, headed by the Toulon merchant Jacques Beuf, and his assistant Delamer. The latter group successfully poached Puget and would thus, evidently, win. Colbert then installed two other groups, the officials of which had the marble extracted by French sculptors who had been sent on the mission: Antoine André for the great banker Pierre Formont and Nicolas Ménard for Jacques Beuf—the first successfully ousting the second. But Formont, who had his sculptor André arrested and replaced with Flamands, was ousted because of his religion and died shortly before the Revocation and the Edict of Nantes (1685). Meanwhile, Genoese artists, the painter Borzone, then the father and son sculptors Solaro succeeded in imposing marble cargoes, and as well, Puget continued to directly procure marble from Carrara, and to even sell it.Louvois, going against the policy of Colbert, changed the system. He first instituted a single official marble company, then withdrew his charge to protect a second, where the same officials are found, Haudiquer de Blancourt and André Lebrun. This company ceased in 1687 ahead of the risk of war.A new episode occurred during the calm between the Treaty of Ryswick and the Spanish War of Succession, in particular, the transport of whole blocks for Coysevox’s Renommée du Roi groups between 1698 and 1701. Then, once again, everything stops until the preparations for the peace allow the sculptor Jean Garavaque, in 1713, to visit the Carrara quarries and prepare the last transport of the reign, in 1714–15.This paper will highlight the impact of political conditions on procurement, in particular the war at sea. We will also see how the available blocks determined the compositions.