Images of Madame de Montespan, a seductive angel/devil

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I've recently discovered Europeana, a great site for text, videos, and images. It's especially great for portraits. Here, for example, are some portraits of Athénaïs de Montespan, some of which I've never seen before:

This one above is credited to Ernest and Mignard. One can see how plump she has become. Here is another by Mignard with a similar theme: 

Athénaïs is often portrayed with her children, no doubt to secure her link to the King. This is another portrait by Mignard: 

And another:

And this one by Charles de La Fosse:

This image by Pierre Gobert is presumed to be of her, and I suspect it likely so:

Her lounging pose was unusual for the time; comfort was a new concept. Here again is a striking study by Nicolas Mignard:

This image of Athénaïs at her chateau at Clagny (Versailles now) is curious: bare legs!

This image, artist unknown (and previously thought to portray Louise de la Vallière) shows a younger Athénaïs with droopy eyes. Might this have been considered the come-hither look?

Here is another, likely even younger portrait, showing her unusual and slightly protruding eyes. 

Here is a fashon plate, dated 1694. I doubt very much that Athénaïs would have been so slender at that time. 

I could easily be on this site all day. 



Sandra Gulland


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On the Wild Side

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Catherine Delors' blog on a Dulwich Gallery art exhibition in London caught my eye: Italian Salvator Rosa (1615 — 1673: bandits, wilderness and magic. Not your usual 17th century fare. 


For example, this haunting portrait, "Lucrezia as poetry":
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A feast of this artist's striking work can be seen on-line:

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Baroque in motion

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I've been enjoying—savouring—a gorgeous book all summer: Baroque—Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, edited by Rolf Toman and liberally illustrated with stunning photographs by Achim Bednorz. This book is a visual feast.

The text is illuminating, as well:

"Baroque art tends in the first instance to make a sensual appeal to the viewer: with theatrical pathos, illusionistic devices, and the interplay of different forms the artist seeks to impress, to convince, and to arouse an internal response. This may explain why the style is often experienced as extravagant, showy, or even pretentious." (page 7)

These are often the words used to describe the baroque style: feverish frenzy, ludicrous, bizarre, confused, florid. In short: over the top.

Reading this book, however, I've come to understand that the baroque style was all about the creation of an illusion. Staircases were key for the staging of entrances and exits. Quoting from the German historian Richard Alewyn:

"... spirit of the baroque ... really only came into its own where there was movement." 

"The staircase provided the classic example of the viewer in motion, an essential principle of all spatial art in baroque." (page 10)

In addition to the stunning example shown on the cover above, here are two other examples of baroque staircases:

Imagine an Escher print in three dimensions: imagine walking through it. That's baroque.


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Baroque post-modern

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I begin each day reading the Poetry Daily. Sometimes a poem will catch me, as did the one this morning, "The Dark Figure in the Doorway" by Morton Marcus.


It's a reflective poem about Diego Velázquez's famous painting of the Spanish Infanta, "Las Meninas" —in English, "The Maids"—painted in 1656.

I recommend that you read that poem, but, to summarize, the author talks about the visual tricks in the painting. The Infanta isn't the one being painted, but the King and Queen, reflected in the mirror behind the painter on the left. Only we are the ones standing in their spot; we are the ones the painter in the painting is studying.


The more I learn about Baroque, the more I come to understand its playfulness, it's tricks. As the poet so well put it:

a post-modern  

bit of fun devised 

centuries before  

the modern age  

will have begun.

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Louis XIV and his heirs: a tragic history

Louis XIV, his son, grandson and great-grandson (tended by his governess), in a painting attributed to Nicolas de Largillière. 


All the King's heirs would predecease him suddenly, one after another. For a clear account, read this blog post by Catherine Delors: here. She has also posted a moving portrait of the surviving child, the future King Louis XV: here.

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Le droit du Seigneur—fact or fiction?

[Above, Vaisly Polenov, a Victorian artist, illustrates Le droit du Seigneur—his fantasy of a man offering his daughters to the feudal lord.]


Le droit de seigneur, or the "right of the first night," is commonly understood to be the right of the lord of an estate to take the virginity of the bride or daughter of a serf working his land.

Fact or fiction?
I've read that there was no evidence to support the belief that this was, in fact, a custom of the Middle Ages, that le droit de seigneur was a fiction people had created about the past. (A lively fiction, in fact: Voltaire wrote a five-act comedy based on it, as is Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro and the movie Braveheart, to name a few.)

Therefore, I was rather interested (and surprised) to see reference to it in The Clermont Assizes of 1665, Abbé Fléchier's memoirs. Fléchier was a judge, and his memoir is, among other things, an account of the cases brought before the court.

The case in question had to do with the suit of a certain Madame de Montvallat to separate from her husband. He stood accused, among other things, of exercising "the nuptial right." I quote:

There is a right, quite commonly exercised in Auvergne, called the nuptial right. ... This right originally allowed the lord the right to be present at all marriages among his subjects; to be present at the bedding of the bride...

This usage is no longer current, either because it would be unbecoming for the lords to be present at all the village weddings and to thrust their leg into the beds of all the respectable people who get married, or because the custom was somewhat incompatible with propriety, and exposed gentlemen who had more authority than self-restraint to dangerous temptation when the opportunity was attractive. 

So a substitue was found for this disgraceful ceremony in a pecuniary gratuity, the lords having agreed to receive a more substantial earnest of their rights [i.e. money] and the subjects being glad to buy themselves off from the application of a law so perilous to their honour. 

So: from this I understand that le droit de seigneur had formerly been a ceremonial custom that occasionally invited abuse, but as of this writing—mid-17th century France—the custom was that the serf simply paid the lord to stay away.

Monsieur de Montvallat, however, was persuaded that old customs were the best when a pretty village girl was to be married, and would not give up his rights; and as they had good reason to fear in his case that he might go beyond the limits of a mere ceremony, they thought it best to capitulate and to give him as substantial a present as they could afford. In any case, he claimed this tribute, which often amounted to half the bride's dowry. 

That the lord had a right in some capacity on the wedding night is clear—that it was a right to take a girl's virginity is not. Somewhere in this grey area, truth resides.

For more on this subject, see Wikipedia.

Note: this post was originally published by me on Hoydens and Firebrands.

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Life, Love & Laughter in the Reign of Louis XIV: not a lot of fun

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I was excited to get Life, Love & Laughter in the Reign of Louis XIV by Robert Challe (translated by A. W. Preston)—a novel written during and about the Court of the Sun King—but after 163 pages, I'm calling it quits.

There is something so often adolescent about the culture of the mid-17th century, an obsessive interest in "Does he love me?" "Does she not?" (and "How rich is her dowry?") that I find wearing.

The novel is multi-layered, in the form of (long, tedious) stories revealed during a social gathering.

It opens in a traffic jam, 17th century style.

...a horseman...found himself caught up in one of those traffic congestions which at the time occurred daily at the end of the rue de Gesvres. ...the carriages ... were streaming in from all sides. [His] valet riding behind him was having the same trouble, and both were in danger of being crushed between the wheels of the carriages ... 

Getting from A to B is difficult for any novelist, but Challe gets his hero out of this fix by having people in various carriage offering him a seat. He stood, unsure which offer to choose, when someone called out more loudly than the others. Our hero dismounted and got in the carriage, managing, as well, to get his footman to climb in after him ...

...preferring to risk his horses rather than leave the young fellow in danger.

This mark of a hero impressed onlookers, who call out to their drivers to avoid running down the two horses. (Not because they care about the horses, mind.) The valet then gets back on his horse and follows after his master and the rescuer, leading his master's horse.

I did like some of the details of daily life in the novel, such as in the scene above. I knew carriages often came head-to-head on narrow streets, but I'd never considered that there could actually be a daily traffic congestion much like rush hour.

Other details I enjoyed:

an in-house tailor instantly making a suit of clothes.

a mailman who delivers door-to-door. (I'd be interested to know when, exactly, this began. I imagine his task was not an easy one, since there were no street addresses.) 

a door weighted to close itself.

sending for a sedan chair.

I'm sure I would glean a handful more such details were I to persevere for another 424 pages, but no, I will resist.

This novel is described as a masterpiece: I beg to differ.

Sandra Gulland

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