Printing the Grand Manner - 9780892369805

Printing the Grand Manner illuminates an extraordinary moment in the intertwined history of painting and printmaking in Europe. The brilliant age of Louis XIV saw the creation of a group of unusually large prints---some measuring an impressive five feet by three feet when assembled---that reproduced works by Charles Le Brun, the king's inventive court painter, designer, and arts administrator. Ambitious in design, masterful in execution, the prints played a fascinating role in both glorifying Louis XIV and shaping critical opinion of Le Brun.

Printing the Grand Manner Focuses On eleven monumental engravings based on history paintings by Charles Le Brun, the court painter to Louis XIV and head of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Between 1666 and 1685, Le Brun called on the most talented printinakers of the era Gerard Audran, Gerard Edelinck, and Alexis I Loir---to reproduce his spectacular histories: five colossal Battles of Alexander canvases, the Fall of the Rebel Angels modello, and two Constantine designs.

Louis Marcesano and Christian Michel explore the story and context of the prints, thoroughly investigating how they were produced, how they expressed individual artistic style, and how they participated in the "histoire du roi" of the period (as royal propaganda was then called).

Although Louis XIV's success and fame were based on agile political and military maneuvers, the French monarch was also an outstanding promoter of his own image and exploits. Establishing a vision of young Louis as a new Alexander the Great was the first phase of royal propaganda. As Louis ascended to the apex of his power, paintings and prints visually elevated him to Mount Olympus-a process convincingly defined in these pages as "from history painting to allegorized history."

Charles Le Brun's Grand Manner paintings glorifying the monarch were widely copied and distributed as engravings that extolled Louis XIV's deeds and conveyed important political messages to viewers far removed from the court Even today, one or more new monographs on Louis XIV are published each year in France, demonstrating an ongoing fascination with his personality and his court a fascination that the Sun King himself sought to cultivate in his own time through the paintings and engravings.

Reproductive printmaking was not a second-rate exercise; engravers were highly trained and imaginative artists who developed their own style. Le Brun eagerly controlled the dissemination of engravings produced using his original concepts and knew exactly to whom he would commit his ideas, frequently preferring the mixed etching and engraving technique of Gerard Audran, for example, to the linear rigor of Gerard Edelinck. Printing the Grand Manner---a beautifully designed, large format book filled with detailed illustrations of the prints allows readers to closely examine the "handwriting" of each engraver, leading to a rich understanding of their unique artistic gifts.

By exploring the intense interaction between painting and printmaking between art theory and unbridled artistic ambition, Printing the Grand Manner breaks new ground in its analysis of both the reproductive prints and Le Brun's original compositions.