Charles Le Brun and Louis XIV: Art, Ethics and the State

Charles Le Brun, founder of the Royal Academy of Painting and most famous painter of his day, was by the 19th century barely remembered. His and the Academy's intimacy with the government of Louis XIV, and the glorifying nature of his mainly "decorative" and largely collaborative output even raised questions of whether his work was "art" at all. This discussion attempts, through an examination of literature, philosophy, politics and current art theory, to understand the social matrix out of which the public art for Louis XIV grew. Not simply ambition, or "absolutism," but the theological concept of the current world order and its social arrangements drove artists into the arms of the state. If the power structure's need for propaganda contributed to this, the artists' own declaration of art as "liberal" imbued it with a "purpose" or a moral imperative that rendered it subservient to royal government or church. This thesis focuses on the literary, philosophical and theoretical traditions, underlaid by strong ethical and moral considerations-largely derived from the Ancients and the Italians-that upheld this view. Le Brun's career is chronologically interspersed within the discussion of theory and its transfer from the learning of the ancients and contemporary Italy to France. Theory, as adopted by his Academy, is discussed in connection with the attempt to arrive at "perfection". In the drive towards it, the appreciation of the element of beauty-or what came later to be called aesthetics-though crucial as a component of the (Platonic) "good," was subservient to ethics. An exploration of Platonism and morality in the current theory of art and during the color quarrel follows. The conclusion, after an examination of the painter's work for the Sun King, is that the symbiosis between art and state reached its apogee under Le Brun but that the reasons for this lay less in the "absolutism" of the age than in the ideas of antiquity as developed into art theory by Le Brun's predecessors. Already containing the seeds of their own destruction, these views nevertheless, lay in the mainstream of contemporary artistic thinking