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Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor
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The Triumph of Venus (detail)
From an eight-piece set of the Triumphs of the Gods
Cartoon by Noël Coypel, 1690–93; the scene copied, with small variants, from a Brussels tapestry by Frans Geubels, ca. 1560–70, from a cartoon of the Grotesques of Leo X painted by Giovanni da Udine probably with Giovanni Francesco Penni and Perino del Vaga, 1519
Woven in the workshop of Jean Jans the Younger at the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins, Paris, 1692–1703
Wool, silk, and gilt-metal-wrapped thread; 16 ft. 5 5/8 in. x 22 ft. 8 7/8 in. (502 x 693 cm)
Deposito Arazzi della Soprintendenza Speciale per Il Polo Museale Fiorentino, Pitti Palace, Florence (Arazzi no. 41)
See an image of the entire panel.
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The successor of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83) as minister to Louis XIV was Michel Le Tellier, marquis de Louvois (1641–91), who commissioned designs from a number of different artists rather than the previously favored artist Charles Le Brun. An equally important initiative taken during his period was the decision to copy fine tapestry and fresco schemes of the sixteenth century, particularly those of the Raphael school. While this effort was partly motivated by a need for new designs to keep the workshops busy, there was also a strong element of cultural elitism in this process, a wish to appropriate to the French court the finest artistic schemes of Rome, Mantua, and Florence. One of the most decorative of these copied designs was the so-called Triumphs of the Gods, which had been conceived for Pope Leo X in the late 1510s by the Raphael workshop. Drawing on ancient painted and sculpted models, the original scheme presented vignettes of classical gods in elaborate "grotesque" settings in a scheme that was designed as an allegorical celebration of Leo's papacy. Louis XIV had acquired a duplicate sixteenth-century weaving of this design between 1663 and 1673 and this formed the basis for new cartoons painted by Noël Coypel (1628–1707) in the mid-1680s. Coypel followed the originals closely, but refined the elegance of the figures in line with contemporary taste. The whimsical vocabulary of this series had a significant influence on the development of other decorative series for the Gobelins and the Beauvais workshops in the 1690s and early 1700s. Eight sets of this design were woven for the French crown between 1686 and 1713. The present panel derives from the second of these weavings.
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