Les enfants - the children of Louis XIV and Louise de La Vallière, marble high-reliefs, circa 1669-70

 

Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Légitimée de France, mademoiselle de Blois, at approximately three or four years old.

Louis de Bourbon, Légitimé de France, comte de Vermandois, at approximately two or three years old.

The sculptures, by an unknown artist, are in the collection of the château de Versailles.

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The duchesse de La Vallière with mademoiselle de Blois and the comte de Vermandois, studio of or a copy after Pierre Mignard.

Louise de La Vallière (Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, duchesse de La Vallière and de Vaujours 6 August 1644 – 6 June 1710) had four children by Louis XIV, two of whom survived early childhood, and only one who reached full adulthood. The first two were registered under false surnames: Charles ‘de Lincourt’ (19 December 1663 – circa 1665 or 1666), who died in infancy and was never legitimized, and Philippe ‘Derssy’ (7 January 1665 – July 1666), who also died in infancy and never legitimized.

Mademoiselle de Blois and the comte de Vermandois, a nineteenth-century copy after Pierre Mignard.

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Marie-Anne de Bourbon, the dowager princesse de Conti, by François de Troy, circa 1690-91.

Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Légitimée de France, mademoiselle de Blois (2 October 1666, Vincennes – 3 May 1739, Paris). In the first of the king's series of scandalous marriages between his illegitimate offspring and members of the royal family, she was wed at the age of thirteen to her eighteen-year-old distant relative Louis Armand I, prince de Conti. Widowed five years later - she contracted smallpox, passed it to her husband; she recovered, he died - she never remarried and had no issue. She inherited the titles of duchesse de La Vallière and de Vaujours from her mother.

The dowager princesse de Conti, by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1706.

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The comte de Vermandois, attributed to François de Troy, before 1683.

Louis de Bourbon, Légitimé de France, comte de Vermandois (2 October 1667, Saint-Germain-en-Laye – 18 November 1683, Flanders). He was seven years old when his mother entered a Carmelite convent in Paris and he was put into the care of his aunt, the duchesse d'Orléans, wife of the king's famously homosexual/bisexual brother. Later, at the age of only fifteen, having joined a secret group of young aristocrats calling themselves La Sainte Congregation des Glorieux Pédérastes, he was involved in a great scandal implicating members of the duc d'Orléans' circle. Several men who practiced le vice italien were banished from court; he was exiled to Normandy. In an attempt at "rehabilitation," his father the king sent him to join a military campaign in Flanders, where he soon fell ill and died. He was just barely sixteen.

The comte de Vermandois, by Pierre Mignard, before 1683.

Die young, live forever - Marcus Claudius Marcellus as Hermes Logios, circa 20 BC

 

Marcellus as Hermes Logios - formerly known as Germanicus - is a life-sized marble funerary monument and portrait of Marcus Claudius Marcellus, nephew of the Roman emperor Augustus. Created some three years after the model's death, Marcellus is portrayed as Hermes Logios, the god of eloquence.

The pose of the idealized figure exemplifies what later became known as the Hermes Ludovisi type, and was based on a popular and much copied 5th century BC Greek prototype, with the addition of a portrait head. 

The statue is signed - carved into the figure of a tortoise at the base of the cloak - "Cleomenes (Kleomenes) the Athenian."

The tortoise on the plinth below the drapery alludes to Hermes' invention of the lyre, for which the tortoise shell served as sounding board. Hermes/Marcellus appears to hold a plectrum in his right hand, a plectrum being a small, flat tool used for the plucking or strumming of a stringed instrument.

By 1590 the statue was in the collection of the Villa Montalto-Negroni, Pope Sixtus V's villa on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. It was purchased from the papal collections by Louis XIV in 1664 and placed in the gardens of Versailles; later it was moved to the château itself and installed in the galerie des Glaces. Napoléon had it transferred to the Louvre in 1802, where it remains to this day.

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Marcus Claudius Marcellus (42–23 BC), the eldest son of Gaius Claudius Marcellus and Octavia the Younger, sister of Augustus. He was educated with his cousin Tiberius and traveled with him to Hispania where they served under Augustus in the Cantabrian Wars. In 25 BC he returned to Rome where he married his cousin Julia, the emperor's daughter. As Augustus' nephew and closest male relative, he would enjoy an accelerated political career. Marcellus and Augustus' general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa were the two popular choices as heir to the empire. In 23 BC an unidentified illness spread through Rome and both Augustus and Marcellus were infected. Augustus barely survived, but the illness proved fatal to Marcellus; he was only twenty years-old. He would be the first member of the imperial family to have his ashes placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus.

The king's pretty box - the "coffret des pierreries" of Louis XIV

 

Jewel box of Louis XIV - previously known as "d'Anne d'Autriche” - created by the goldsmiths Jakob Blanck and Jean Pitan, 1675-76. Remarkably never having been sold, through the subsequent reigns of kings and emperors, through revolutions, the box now resides in the collection of the Musée du Louvre.

This jewel box was naïvely presumed, because of its rather feminine floral decoration, to have been the property of the king's mother, Anne of Austria - her name still clings to it - or that of his wife, Queen Marie-Thérèse/María Teresa, Infanta of Spain and Portugal. But scholarship has now credited it to the king's own collection. The chest was likely used as a store for diamond buttons, hat clips, shoe buckles, epaulettes, and the like, intended to adorn his court costumes.

The box consists of a rectangular wooden base covered with blue silk satin. It is lavishly embellished, over its entire surface, by five plates of gold openwork comprised of foliate and floral motifs; the realistic treatment of the motifs allows the viewer to clearly distinguish precise representations of anemones, tulips, buttercups, daffodils, etc. The gold decoration was created using the lost-wax casting technique, then reworked, chiseled, burnished or matted, and includes some additions of filigree. 

Dancing at the opera - dancers (as well as two singers and a few actresses) of the Paris Opéra, circa 1690-1700

 

In 1661 Louis XIV, a lover of ballet and an enthusiastic dancer himself, established the Académie Royale de Danse, intended to codify court and character dances and to certify dance teachers. The Opéra de Paris, still the primary opera and ballet company of France, was founded in 1669 by the king as the Académie d'Opéra, and shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully; it was officially renamed the Académie Royale de Musique, but continued to be known more simply as the Opéra. The two institutions were closely related but never merged, and members of the dance academy were also associated with the Opéra. From 1671 until Lully's death, the dance academy was under the direction of the great dancing master Pierre Beauchamp, the man who codified ballet's five positions of the feet. Together, Lully and Beauchamp made theatrical ballet an important part of the Opéra's productions. The ballet of the time was merely an extension of the opera, having yet to evolve into an independent form of theatrical art, as baroque ballet would one day evolve into classical ballet.