Anyone who has ever been to Versailles knows that it was stripped of its contents during the French Revolution.
But what happened to the stupendous collections of furniture, sculpture, porcelain and paintings assembled by the most voracious of all royal collectors, Marie Antoinette? Fortunately, instead of destroying them, the murderers of Louis XVI and his queen sold them.
The sale of the furniture and belongings of the “So-Called Queen” took place on August 25, 1793 — two months before her own death on the scaffold. Any item bought at the sale could be taken abroad tax-free — an open invitation to foreign collectors to remove all traces of the hated queen from French soil.
However, in recent years, a number of her possessions have found their way back to Versailles and are displayed in this blockbuster show at the Grand Palais in Paris, which Arizzoli-Clementel has put together.
He uses foreign loans, together with documentary material in the form of prints and letters to tell Marie Antoinette’s story with all the panache it deserves. Whether your primary interest is history, biography or art, the show is a joy and the installation theatrical and extravagant.
Story of her life
The story starts in Vienna, in the palace of Schonbrunn, where Archduchess Marie Antoinette was born to the Roman emperor, Francis I, and Maria Theresa, in 1755. Though she was to gain a well-deserved reputation for frivolity, she was taught the French language and literature, and given lessons in music and art.
Displayed in the first galleries are pieces she might have known at the Viennese court, including Austrian painted furniture, Chinese lacquer and objects made of hard stone.
Some of the most spectacular works are by foreign artists, including a view of Schonbrunn by the Italian Bernardo Bellotto, pastel portraits of the royal children by the Frenchman Jean Etienne Liotard and a service of green-and-white Sevres porcelain presented to Marie Theresa by King Louis XV in 1756.
On her marriage to the king’s grandson in 1770, the 14-year-old was introduced to a new world of luxury, taste and artistic sophistication. In that year, the new dauphine was presented with a table-mounted jewel casket by the German-born cabinet-maker Martin Carlin.
Decorated with marquetry of rosewood and sycamore, and inset with 13 Sevres porcelain plaques painted with brightly coloured sprays of flowers, the delicacy and refinement of the piece makes the Viennese furniture look hopelessly provincial.
Remarkable as they are, such pieces are only the hors d’oeuvre.
It is only after Marie Antoinette became queen in 1774 that she began to exercise her taste and judgment in art.
In 1778, the queen summoned the 23-year-old Elizabeth Vigee-Le Brun to Versailles to paint the magnificent full-length portrait showing her in full court dress.
From then until she fled for her life in 1789, Vigee-Le Brun would paint the queen, her children and her friends in portraits that are at once modulated and amusing.
Though stylistically these portraits are closer to the neo-classicism of Jacques-Louis David than to the painters of the court of Louis XV, in their nuances and gentilities we sense the best in the ancient regime.
In the 1780s, the queen was spending vast sums on different works of art. What is remarkable is not how much she spent but the knowledge and taste she displayed in her choice of the most advanced artists and craftsmen of her time.
I never thought I would feel like genuflecting in front of pieces of furniture but the cylindrical secretary in mother of pearl, gilt bronze and silver made by the master cabinet-maker Jean-Henri Riesener for her boudoir at Fontainebleau, and the set of armchairs carved with wreaths of flowers and classical ornaments by Georges Jacob for the Petit Trianon are great works of art.
Wherever you look, the eye alights on something exquisite — from a pair of gilt bronze fire dogs in the shape of sphinxes by Pierre-Philippe Thomire to a table of ebony and sycamore, Japanese lacquer and gilt bronze by the German Adam Weisweiler.
Sinister gradation
At first you are left speechless with admiration in front of works of such perfection and refinement. But gradually, as the opulence becomes more and more incredible, it also becomes sinister.
By the time you come to the famous diamond necklace that caused the scandal of 1785-86, often cited as one of the causes of the French Revolution, you begin to feel a twinge of revulsion.
Even though what is on display is a 20th-century copy made of white sapphires and pearls, in terms of design, the necklace is a grotesque object, more bling than art. Next to it is a jewel chest in which she presumably intended to keep it.
The quality of the workmanship by Ferdinand Schwerdfeger here is as fine as ever but, suddenly, the enormous scale of the piece feels obscene, especially if we recall that charming little jewel chest made for the dauphine by Carlin in 1770.
By now, the Queen was hated. She tried to effect an image makeover by commissioning portraits that showed her surrounded by her children. But it was too late.
A darkened hall downstairs is devoted to the agony of her imprisonment and execution. In addition to revolutionary propaganda and the simple furniture and utensils she used in prison, a long wall is spotlit with short extracts from her letters at this time.
In her acceptance of the inevitable, she regains some of the sympathy she had lost in the final years. On the far wall, hung on its own, is Jacques-Louis David’s drawing of the queen in a tumbrel on her way to the scaffold. Often as I have seen it in reproduction, it has never struck me with the emotional force it has here.
Marie Antoinette is on at Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris until June 30.
