Louis XIV européen. Le discours des images
Work published with the financial support of the CRCV.
Sylvain-Karl Gosselet, Louis XIV européen. Le discours des images, éditions Champ Vallon, collection “Époques”, May 2024, 15,5 x 24 cm, 428 p., €28 (ISBN: 979-10-267-1238-1).
Louis XIV was known as the “arbiter of Europe”: did he ever see himself - or did others ever see him - as having an even more distinguished role, that of leader of the whole continent, for example? We can learn more about this from the arts than from any text. Art still has much to tell us about the Sun King, and it would be a mistake to think that there is nothing more to write or say about him. In the arts, the symbolic combination of Louis XIV and Europe, the latter often depicted allegorically as a queen, proved particularly expressive. Associating the two meant that the Sun King’s splendour could be displayed in all its majesty, as with no other monarch, from birth to death, in both palaces and popular prints, from Marseille to Versailles, thus revealing the image of an ultra-powerful “Louis XIV of Europe”.
Sylvain-Karl Gosselet, a History of Art graduate and Doctor of History, is a research engineer at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique à l’université Paris Cité.
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To be published on May 31.
