Mercury putting on his Sandal
Louvre, Paris
FALCONET
L’amour Menaçant
Louvre, Paris
The results must have more than reached the king’s anticipations. In those days, the gardens were studded with statuary. There was, for instance, the early Fountain of the Dragon. Water spouted from the beast’s mouth to a height of twenty-eight metres. Around sported four dolphins, while the design was completed by the cupids seated on swans, which darted their arrows at the dragon in the centre. Similar groups arose from every basin. Two of these were set up on the terrace. A double flight of stairs, richly ornamented with statuary, led thence to the grounds. Here the wanderer came upon such a beauty spot as the Allée d’Eau, with its border of pines and its hundred and four copper vases set with yew-trees. Throughout the Walk were groups of statues. Or, maybe, he visited Girardon’s “Pyramid.” This consisted of four superimposed basins. The highest was supported on four cray fish, the second on four dolphins and the others on tritons, the lowest tier rising from the four larger tritons who swam in the great basin. The lavish expenditure upon the sculpture at Versailles may be judged from the payment of 1400 livres in 1671 to the painter-gilder Bailly “on account of the gilding and bronzing applied to the fontaine en pyramide.”
The Eighteenth Century
If a clear realization of the gardens at Versailles is necessary for the true appreciation of such a work as Girardon’s “Apollo and the Nymphs,” the interior of a French palace must be pictured if the smaller sculptures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are to be understood. The sculptors worked with the knowledge that their works were eventually to be placed in such rooms as the Salon of Venus at Versailles with its marble walls, its green velvet hangings and silver chandeliers, or the Throne Room, with its decorations of crimson and gold, its ceiling by Delafosse and pictures by Titian, Guido Reni, Rubens and Van Dyck, or even the great Galérie des Glaces, 240 feet in length, with its seventeen great windows framed by Corinthian pilasters, and faced by the seventeen mirrored arches running along the opposite side. Many sculptures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which we rightly consider insipid and unsatisfying, may well have served their purpose at the time. They cannot, however, be properly judged apart from the richly decorated salons which they were designed to complete.
This is true of a portion of the sculpture of Louis Quatorze. It is even more true of practically all the sculpture of Louis Quinze and Louis Seize. If the seventeenth century was the period of the great decorative sculptors, the characteristic of the eighteenth century was its demand for smaller works. The reign of Louis Quatorze had been a building age. In the main, it called for architectural sculpture. Eighteenth-century taste, however, ran in the direction of the single-figured statue and the statuette. The tendency was exactly that which, in the art of painting, produced a Watteau and a Fragonard in place of a Nicholas Poussin and a Charles Lebrun. The growing popularity of smaller statues was the equivalent of the increased demand for easel pictures.
Under the circumstances it is not to be wondered that the eighteenth-century French sculptors lost the fine sense of decorative effectiveness with which the school of Louis XIV. had been endowed. As a consequence they were far less successful in carrying out the larger public works which every nation demands from time to time. On the contrary, the smaller works produced in the eighteenth century were often instinct with vivacity and charm. It was only when they essayed the greater tasks that the sculptors failed to throw off completely what may be termed the boudoir manner.
CLODION