37. Charles Le Brun,
Ceiling of the Galerie des Glaces, 1678-1684.

Château de Versailles, Versailles.

 

 

The main exponent of this corresponding style to the Italian Baroque was the painter and architect Charles Le Brun. In contrast to his predecessor François Mansart, who moved to strict classical forms according to the example of Palladio – this is seen above all in his two main works the Maison-sur-Seine and the church Val de Grace in Paris . Le Brun sought to heighten the effects of this Baroque style by all the means permitted by a monarch with unlimited power. As an architect he was superb, above all in the 73-metre long Galerie des Glaces of the Palace of Versailles in which the monumental was as completely combined with the decorative as with no other work of the period.

 

Painting

Perhaps portraits are really the best that French painting of the seventeenth century has left behind. Simon Vouet, an important representative of the French Baroque, was, at the movement’s inception, the classic example of this. Vouet was also a teacher of painting, and his most noteworthy student was undoubtedly Eustache Le Sueur.

With the reward of having achieved the best of the contemporary art, the French portraitists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also have the merit of having given to the future the most important impressions for evaluating historically important personalities. Other well-known painters from the period of Louis XIV include Pierre Mignard, who painted the portrait of the niece of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, Maria Mancini; Nicolas de Largillière, who made a name for himself as a historical painter; and Hyacinthe Rigaud, who painted Louis XIV (1701) in his full majestic glory.