Gaston d’Orléans et le collectionnisme d’antiques : une pratique politique et culturelle léguée à Louis XIV ?

Abstract

In an analysis involving political history and the history of royal and princely collecting, I propose to study the material and symbolic legacy that Gaston d’Orléans left for his nephew Louis XIV. We know that the royal collections inherited, among other things, Monsieur’s botanical and numismatic collections, and it is legitimate to wonder about the collecting practices that Louis XIV inherited. It is known that, whatever the political circumstances may have been, Gaston’s emissaries travelled all over Italy in search of Roman medals and antique sculptures, and that he removed a large number of antiquities from Latium, despite repeated prohibitions by the papal authorities. Louis XIV developed a ‘compensatory ardour’ for enriching the Cabinet des Antiques and the Cabinet des Médailles. We propose to examine the movement of these antiques (coins, engraved stones, sculptures, etc.) from foreign collections to Versailles collections, via Gaston d’Orléans, in the light of the political and cultural history of connoisseurship: from 1661 onwards, the sovereign set out to be the greatest collector in the kingdom, and as such he benefited from a rich heritage, both material (thanks to the many antiques bequeathed by Gaston) and symbolic; private collections, even those of royal rank, would henceforth enter the State’s collections.

Keywords

• collectionnism
• Orléans (Gaston d’)
• Antiques
• Louis XIV