Image credit: Attributed to Domenico Cucci and his workshop, Figure of Louis XIV, 1662-64. Manufactured by the Gobelins Workshop in Paris. Gilt bronze and porphyry, 18 1/2” (h) x 10 1/2” (l) x 15 1/4” (w). The Frick Collection, New York. March 2023 installation shot of the Gregory Gift exhibition at The Frick Madison. Courtesy of the Frick Collection.
As The Frick Collection curator Marie-Laure Buku Pongo explained recently in the most accessible way, “Louis XIV (1638 -1715) would have been right at home in today’s selfie era.”
Ample evidence for this claim abounds (in fact, all of Versailles was decorated and configured symbolically to amplify the so-called Sun King’s position at the center of court and indeed the universe) but Pongo was directing our gaze in particular to this 18 1/2” x 10” gilt bronze figure that entered the collection as part of the extensive Gregory Gift (on exhibit now) and offers a stellar example (no pun intended) of the kind of exquisite craftsmanship and self-aggrandizing political propaganda the French king appreciated and deployed throughout his reign. It depicts the idealized monarch wearing splendid armor, a draped cloak, and a lion’s pelt (a well-known reference to Hercules), holding a regal scepter in his right hand. Intended to celebrate the king’s glorious, hard-won victory over the Spanish, the sculpture was manufactured at the Gobelins workshop in Paris as one of a pair of gilt bronze statues crowning a giant cabinet produced specially for the ruler; the other statuette may have shown him riding a chariot. That’s a lot of intricate, extravagant detail and symbolic freight for two pieces you had to look up high to actually see, and a whole lot of Louis as well!
Definitely a different time and place! Needless to say, Versailles during the 2nd half of the 17th century was absolutely Louis XIV’s world and everyone else was just living in it.