The Splendid Century

THE history of art is to a certain extent one long series of rehabilitations. As styles change, men and periods slip into comparative obscurity, and a later age whisks them back into favor. So it has been to a large degree with the art of France in the 17th century--a century that for a long time seemed too staid and static for modern tastes. Since World War II, museums on both sides of the Atlantic have been fighting for the few surviving works of the 17th century master Georges de La Tour. Last summer, the Louvre put on the biggest exhibit of Nicolas Poussin ever held.

This week the Toledo Museum of Art is displaying the first major exhibition of French 17th century art ever shown in the U.S. (see color). The show, billed as "The Splendid Century," was five years in the gathering, involved scores of French officials from Cultural Minister Andre Malraux on down, includes works from 50 French and U.S. museums. It opened in Washington's National Gallery, in March will move to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, its final stop.

In some ways the paintings and sculptures are not native French. In the first years of the century, such "mannerists" as Jacques Bellange and Jacques Callot--a school that liked to dramatize its paintings by theatrical elongations, foreshortenings and tricks of lighting--were still active, but the school as a whole had had its day. New styles were needed, and most of them had to be borrowed. Poussin developed his meticulous classicism in Rome, where he worked most of his life. Philippe de Champaigne moved to Paris from his native Flanders, and a school of naturalists bore the stamp of the Italian Caravaggio. But what the French borrowed they made their own. Under Henri IV (who ruled from 1589 to 1610) and Louis XIII (1610-43), France's artists were free spirits, and they used their freedom well.

Pastry Cook's Path. One name boldly signed to the Splendid Century is Le Nain. It belonged to three famous brothers of Laon, who, confusingly, often worked together on the same canvas and rarely signed their first names to anything. But scholars have gone far in separating the three. Antoine, according to contemporary accounts, "excelled in miniatures and portraits in small." The peasant paintings of Louis, the most talented of the three, were a happy blend of Dutch naturalism and Roman classicism. Mathieu, the most successful, became master painter to the city of Paris, assumed the title of Seigneur de la Jumelle. But this sort of pomposity does not invade his Card Players. The game is tense, the players wary; an everyday scene becomes a study in suspense.

A Le Nain contemporary, the onetime pastry cook Claude Lorrain, was a classicist, but he followed a far different path than Poussin took. He was less interested in ideas or subject matter than in the wonders that nature poured out all around him. He was the first Frenchman to paint similar scenes at different times of day, the first to record the fickle moods of light. His Seaport is as well ordered as a classical painting should be, but there is a quiet sadness about the yellow daylight and a heavy loneliness about the dancing sea.

Portraitist's Protest. By the time Lorrain died in Rome in 1682, all France had become the servant of Louis XIV, then halfway through his 72-year reign. The function of the artist was to glorify the Sun King, often as a Roman emperor or a god; and the King had his own esthetic dictator to see that this was done.

According to Painter Charles Le Brun, all art could be reduced to a series of formulas. It should appeal to the mind rather than the eye, must force nature to comply with the rigid rules of perspective, proportion and reason. Since form was more permanent than color, it was also more important. Le Brun even wrote a manual on how to portray each emotion.

Breaking the rules naturally became the sly ambition of the more skilled and spirited artists. One such was Hyacinthe Rigaud, portraitist of the Marquis de Dangeau. Rigaud's primary purpose was obviously to flatter, but in so doing he threw all of Le Brun's strictures out the window. Voluptuous draperies billow in the background in the manner of Rubens. The gold and glitter become a feast not for the mind but the eye; color dominates form, and classicism surrenders to baroque self-indulgence. In few works of art was Louis' age of splendor shown up more clearly as the time of vanity it was.

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