The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV

Peter Burke's encompassing look at royal imagery during the reign of Louis XIV is the work of a historian. It is informed by new methodologies, yet it is an accessible account that reminds us of the advantages in certain cases of standing on the high ground for a sweeping look at the terrain. Robert Berger's meticulously researched work on the Louvre provides a contrasting example of a close-up view of a single work from the same period. In addition to its own merits, Berger's study can be useful here in filling out and testing the broader means and ends pursued by Burke. However, since Burke's methods are potentially applicable to a greater number of works and to periods beyond the 17th century, this review is for the most part concerned with his novel presentation of materials and his insights into the relationship between art and power.

By art-historical standards Burke's is a compact volume--just over 200 pages in the main text, which includes 88 illustrations. Despite its relative brevity, a spectrum of images, documents, genres, events, and characters is assembled to represent the "fabrication" of the king's public persona from his birth in 1638 to his death in 1715. Individual works--usually analyzed within the context of a cycle, a monument, a medium, or a limited time frame--are viewed in their multiple, shifting relationships to other representations, genres, chronologies, and meanings. Burke thus builds an expanded horizon of expectations against which single texts and objects can be explained, and he further extends this horizon by setting up a dialogue between 17th- and 20th-century interpretive positions. He responds to, but also incorporates, previous approaches to the period: the "cynical view," which explains all representations of the king as deceptive flatteries designed to exalt and control, and the "innocent view," which interprets the ritualization of power as a collective need. As it should be, Burke's panorama is suggestive and cautionary rather than argumentative. Occasionally an evident lack of space for elaborating an idea, or an inescapable brush with the formulaic, will give pause to the specialist, but overall this is a book that will be useful to different types of readers in a number of fields. Here, I would like to focus on some selected points that should be of interest to art historians.

The first two chapters of the book ("Introducing Louis XIV" and "Persuasion") set out Burke's sound procedures. First, royal imagery is approached as a form of pluralistic communication: Burke states his goal as "the attempt to discover who was saying what about Louis to whom, through what channels and codes, in what settings, with what intentions, and with what effects". Second, Burke wrestles with the problem of anachronisms. He notes that a 20th-century interest in propaganda has led to an interest in the myth of Louis XIV. Yet he recognizes the inadequacies of applying notions arising from the modern manipulation of mass media to images that involved other expectations and audiences. Works praising the king might seem from a post-World War II perspective like varieties of propaganda designed to sway a resistant populace. But from within the age of kings, Burke suggests, such works could be understood, for example, as expressions of the king's power and of his subjects' devotion. Triumphal forms, heroic epics, and panegyrics had a range of aesthetic and social purposes and were most often directed not to the "masses," but to a receptive, rhetorically skilled audience. I would agree with Burke's effort to redress an imbalance in contemporary perspectives. Yet, to say that the concept of propaganda was lacking during this period or was only an affair of the Church (propaganda fidei) is perhaps an overstatement. Secular rulers were not blind to the successful methods of religious rulers. End even if an audience is receptive and "conscious of the techniques of persuasion," a message can still be propagandistic. In the course of his revision, Burke does well not to object to a more comprehensive definition of propaganda, such as "the attempt to transmit social and political values".

Limited 20th-century views of the imagery and ideology of the ancien regime are further addressed by Burke, who applies an inclusiveness more typical of the age he studies. Burke's broad and flexible definition of the king's "image" covers a diversity of works or performances from the traditional arts. He attends to histories as well as portraits, rituals as well as single objects, various types of texts about the king from newspaper articles to sermons and plays, and positive as well as negative imagery. Burke's inclusiveness also presents the making of the king's image as affected by decisions beyond those of the absolute ruler or his powerful minister. He sees it as the product of an accretion of customs and operations, given a new emphasis and organization by the king, his advisers, and his artists, and continuously readjusted to the circumstances of Louis's long reign.