Les statues des rois de France et hommes d’État de la galerie de pierre haute de l’aile du Nord : une ambitieuse commande de sculptures pour les Galeries historiques de Versailles

Abstract

From 1835 to 1838, twelve sculptors were commissioned by the royal administration to execute thirteen marble pedestrian statues for the upper stone gallery of the North Wing of the Château de Versailles. Delivered until the end of the July Monarchy, the works took their place among the eighty other sculptures presented in the gallery. Particularly homogeneous from a stylistic point of view, the series is the most ambitious commission of marble sculptures for the History Galleries entrusted to renowned contemporary artists. The study of the genesis of this ambitious project and its realization elucidates the mechanisms of the official commission in Louis-Philippe’s Versailles. The analysis of the historicist sculpted portraits of sovereigns and functionaries from the early medieval period to the early Renaissance provides information about the iconographic sources used by the sculptors, as well as about the mode of representation they adopted to satisfy Louis-Philippe’s political and didactic designs. The exhibition of most of the statues at the Salon, where they were the subject of both positive and negative criticism, calls into question the degree of creative freedom granted to the sculptors within the supposedly strict framework of the official commission, and in the context of the numerous artistic movements that, like Romanticism, made the Parisian scene so lively.

Keywords

• Versailles
• statues
• Louis-Philippe
• historicism
• series
• marble