When we think of Versailles today, if we think of it at all, we are apt to see it as a decadent waste of time and money on the part of an absolute monarchy slated for imminent extinction. There is much to commend this view, for although there is surely greatness in Versailles, there is not nearly enough of it. Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s chapel is inarguably one of the finest buildings from the reign of Louis XIV, and the Petit Trianon with its sundry pavilions, designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, is among the worthiest conceived under Louis XV. As for the rest of it, we might say, paraphrasing a 19th-century humorist’s comment on Wagner, that it is not nearly as good as it looks.
In many respects, Louis XIV, the main force behind the structure we see today, was a surprisingly superficial man. Possessed of an intelligence only slightly above average, in contrast to his predecessor and his successor, he rarely read a book and was primarily interested in grand scenographic effects. The art historian Anthony Blunt was exactly right when he wrote that Versailles “presents a whole of unparalleled richness and impressiveness; but it offers little in either painting, sculpture, or architecture which is of the first quality in itself. Louis XIV aimed first and foremost at a striking whole, and to produce it his artists sacrificed the parts.”
Thus the most emblematic image that we have of Versailles is its endlessly expanding garden façade, which seems to consume the entire horizon. This too was designed by Mansart, but at breakneck speed, with none of the care he lavished on his chapel: Its use of the classical orders is merely adequate, while the massing, with its flat roof coursing uninflected for a quarter of a mile, is an exercise in tedium. And although the interiors, especially the Hall of Mirrors, were ably designed by Charles Le Brun, the premier peintre du roi, they have been marred by the very indifferent paintings that cover the walls and ceilings and that, more often than not, were executed by Le Brun himself.
It is the splendor of Versailles, rather than its failings, that is on display in a valuable new show at the Met, Visitors to Versailles, curated by Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot. In essence, this is a show about Versailles itself, its architecture, interior décor, and garden design. But its stated concentration is a little unusual: It purports to be about the experience of visitors, mostly foreigners, to the palace, and it certainly sustains this theme in the early part of the show by focusing on the protocols of dress and demeanor incumbent on all visitors to Versailles. Among the exhibits are 18th-century guidebooks and souvenirs, as well as period apparel of the sort that visitors were required to wear. Ultimately, however, one suspects that this unusual focus may have served as an excuse to bring in Jefferson and Franklin and thus to entice American viewers who might otherwise balk at an exhibition devoted essentially to decorative art.
Nevertheless, the show’s real interest is in its forays into art and architecture. Through paintings and architectural models, we gain a very solid sense of visiting Versailles, either in the ancien régime or today. And although the palace and its grounds might seem as removed from our world as the pomaded fops who once haunted its endless corridors, in fact it is one of the more influential buildings in history and the implications of its urbanism are directly relevant to our modern realities.
In the most literal sense, the Palace of Versailles was meant to project, in purely architectonic terms, Louis XIV’s supremacy among the earthly powers. More immediately, the Corinthian capitals, rusticated bases, and demure balustrades of its exterior, no less than the tapestries and paintings, the silver and porcelain of its interiors, bear witness to that moment, some 60 years into the reign of the Sun King, when the poles of European art shifted and France replaced Italy in the forefront of visual culture. The hegemony thus established would last well into the 20th century.
At the same time, Versailles played into the mercantilist economic policy of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister. However spendthrift the French monarchs were, with their endless wars and endless palaces, they—or at least their ministers—had a practical side. Colbert and before him Cardinal Mazarin were quite explicit in wanting the French to import nothing that French artisans could produce themselves and produce so well that other nations would feel compelled to buy it. This thinking led to the founding of the great royal manufactories of Louis XIV’s reign, from the porcelain at Sèvres to the carpets of Savonnerie and the tapestries of Gobelins. The Palace of Versailles became a vast showroom of the French-made luxury goods on view in the Met show, and many an ambassador or foreign visitor to Versailles went home with a Sèvres tea service or a Riesener mechanical table like the one he had just seen in the king’s chambers.
Versailles quickly became a huge tourist draw, perhaps the first great tourist destination in France. From all corners, visitors descended on the palace to marvel at this wonder of the modern world. Although they had to observe a dress code and, if attending an audience with the king, follow a punctilious protocol, in general everyone was welcome to visit the vast gardens of André Le Nôtre and even to enter the palace itself. A brisk touristic infrastructure emerged, consisting of souvenirs in the form of ornamental fans and guides to the palace’s history, its menagerie of exotic animals, its famed hedge maze, and its orangerie.
And if many of these visitors came away feeling they had to have a Sèvres tea service of their own, some visiting monarchs were convinced they needed a Château de Versailles of their own. From Peterhof and the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to the Royal Palace of Stockholm, from the Caserta near Naples to the Palacio Real in Madrid, many an estate was built because European potentates were drawn irresistibly into the game of keeping up with the Bourbons.
Even those most antimonarchical emissaries of our nascent republic, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, could not fail to respond to the transcendent effect of Versailles. But in a sense they surpassed even the most vainglorious grandees of old Europe in conceiving not a palace but an entire city—Washington, D.C.—on the model of Versailles and its grounds. If they appear to have learned little architecturally from the building itself, they immediately grasped its urbanistic implications. Surely it is no coincidence that the creator of Washington’s 1791 master plan, Pierre L’Enfant, spent his formative years in or near the palace. In consequence, it is difficult for an American to visit Versailles without being powerfully reminded of Washington and difficult to understand Washington’s genesis without knowing something about the gardens and urban planning of the palace.
Those broad, seemingly infinite avenues, those vast monumental prospects that overwhelm the pedestrian and announce their terminal point half an hour before one reaches it are the essence of both Versailles and the American capital. The revolutionary urbanism of Louis XIV’s palace manifests itself in three massive avenues, among the broadest in the world at their creation, that commence at the gate of the Ailes des Ministres and fan out in a three-pronged configuration known as a patte d’oie or goose foot. Although this monumental urban form seems fairly commonplace today, it was nearly unprecedented in 1682 and was the inspiration for the half-dozen avenues that radiate from Dupont Circle, among other intersections. The Washington Mall as well, implicit in L’Enfant’s plan and explicit in the 1902 McMillan Plan, was clearly modeled on the mile-long Grand Canal and the accompanying parterres that dominate the gardens of Versailles.
Like such other planned capitals as St. Petersburg and La Plata—the administrative center of the Buenos Aires province—Washington exhibits the virtues of Versailles in its elegance and instant spatial legibility. But it also partakes of the defects of Versailles in its massive, almost superhuman scale and in that taxing, all-conquering regularity that can overwhelm the visitor. This defect, however, seems entirely beside the point amid all the charming, glittering objects now on view at the Met.
