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Press Release
Exhibitions
A Season Devoted to the
Seventeenth Century
In spring 2015 the Musée du Louvre is showcasing the art of the
seventeenth century with three exhibitions: two at the Louvre
itself (“Poussin and God” and “Making Sacred Images”), the
third, “Velázquez,” at the Grand Palais.
The Louvre’s focus is therefore on the French “grand siècle,” with a
new look at its most famous painter, Nicolas Poussin, and his
religious paintings.
In connection with this first exhibition, a second presentation (in the
same part of the museum) aims to shed light on the nature and
creation of sacred images in Rome and Paris, two cities where
Poussin lived and worked in a century that was profoundly marked
by religious conflict and spiritual revival.
In coproduction with the RMN-GP (Réunion des Musées Nationaux-
Grand Palais) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, the
Louvre is also presenting the first monographic exhibition in France
devoted to Velázquez, an outstanding artist described by Manet as
“the painters’ painter.”
Poussin and God Musée du Louvre / Hall Napoléon
April 2–June 29, 2015
Exhibition Curators : Nicolas Milovanovic, Department of Paintings,
musée du Louvre, and Mickaël Szanto, Paris Sorbonne University
Making Sacred Images: Rome–Paris (1580–1660) Musée du Louvre / Hall Napoléon
April 2–June 29, 2015
Exhibition Curators : Louis Frank, Department of Prints and
Drawings, and Philippe Malgouyres, Department of Decorative Arts,
musée du Louvre
Velázquez
Grand Palais / Galeries Nationales
March 25–July 13, 2015
Exhibition Curator: Guillaume Kientz, Department of Paintings,
musée du Louvre
RMN-GP Press Contact: Florence Le Moing
[email protected] / +33 (0)1 40 13 47 62
External Relations Department Press contact
Anne-Laure Béatrix, Director Céline Dauvergne
Adel Ziane, Head of Communication Subdepartment [email protected] -Tél. +33 (0)1 40 20 84 66
Sophie Grange, Head of Press Division
Nicolas Poussin, The Annunciation (detail)
© The National Gallery, Londres, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais / National Gallery Photographic Department
Guido Reni, Christ with the Reed (détail) musée du
Louvre © RMN - Grand Palais (musée du
Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle
Diego Velázquez, María Teresa (1638–1683),
Infanta of Spain © The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, dist. Rmn-Grand Palais / Malcom Varon
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Press Release
Exhibition
April 2–June 29, 2015
Hall Napoléon
Making Sacred Images Rome–Paris, 1580–1660
The great reform movement that shook the Church in the
sixteenth century comprised a profound reflection on the nature
of sacred images, fiercely attacked by the Protestants.
With some 85 works (prints and drawings, paintings, objets
d’art, sculptures), “Making Sacred Images” aims to explore the
complex issues at the heart of the religious art created by the
greatest seventeenth-century painters, sculptors, and architects,
such as Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Gian
Lorenzo Bernini, and Pietro da Cortona in Rome, and Simon
Vouet, Eustache Le Sueur, Philippe de Champaigne, or the Le
Nain brothers in Paris.
Following the upheaval of the religious crisis and the
stabilization of the Catholic and Protestant positions, the Church
of Rome undertook its own reform. This is most impressively
illustrated by the Council of Trent (1545–1563) which
reaffirmed, for instance, the possibility, legitimacy, and
usefulness of sacred images, profoundly and brutally attacked by
the Protestants.
This was the backdrop against which artists and their clients
reflected on how to make new images that would be acceptable:
how could such images be created and what was the artist’s role
in the process? It was admitted that Christ or the Virgin Mary
could be represented as they were incarnate, but how could they
be given features when their faces were unknown? Could artists
invent such images and give them validity in the eyes of
believers?
The religious crisis of the sixteenth century saw a revival of the
campaign against images. From the 1520s onward, this led to the
reappearance of a virulent iconoclasm which found its fullest
expression in France and the Netherlands in the 1560s. The Catholic
Church was quick to act in defense of images, particularly at the
twenty-fifth and final session of the Council of Trent in December
1563.
After a brief period of reaction, Italian religious art was restructured
in the 1580s according to the principles of devout purity and truth.
This sparked an unexpected revival resulting in a movement of
incomparable richness. Our presentation, resonating with the
exhibition “Poussin and God,” aims to illustrate two related but rival
visions: that of Rome, where the love of images was given
triumphant expression, and that of Paris, where the peaceful
coexistence of Catholics and Protestants after the Edict of Nantes
gave rise to a more restrained, less theatrical but equally rich form of
artistic expression.
Exhibition catalogue edited by Louis
Frank and Philippe Malgouyres.
Co-published by Somogy Editions d’Art
and Musée du Louvre Editions. With the
support of Arjowiggins Graphic.
Guido Reni, Christ with the Reed (détail)
musée du Louvre © RMN - Grand Palais
(musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle
Exhibition Curators
Louis Frank, Department of Prints and
Drawings, and Philippe Malgouyres,
Department of Decorative Arts, Musée du
Louvre
External Relations Department Press contact
Anne-Laure Béatrix, Director Céline Dauvergne
Adel Ziane, Head of Communication Subdepartment [email protected] -Tél. +33 (0)1 40 20 84 66
Sophie Grange, Head of Press Division
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Central to the exhibition is the significance of the Christian love of
images. In Christianity, God took on the face and body of a man,
thereby lending himself to the image: this is the Church’s age-old
argument to justify the presence and veneration of sacred images.
And at a deeper level, the Christian God has, in himself, the nature
of an Image.
The exhibition is presented in four thematic sections that explore the
principal issues raised by the making of sacred images in the
seventeenth century. It begins with one of the main Catholic
arguments for the legitimate existence of images: if Jesus left
imprints of his face and body for men to see, then God approves of
images. The following sections introduce two different,
complementary realities: triumphant papal Rome in the period
around the great Jubilee (Holy) years of 1600, 1625, and 1650; and
Paris, the mirror of a country scarred by the divisions of the religious
wars, where the Church was seeking independence from the papacy.
The exhibition concludes with a section on the Eucharist and the
Blessed Sacrament, which acquired greater importance in the
seventeenth century and is explored here in its dimension as a sign
and ultimate image.
Images “Not Made by Hands” The tradition of “acheiropoieta”—images “not made by hands” and
said to have been imprinted by the body or face of Christ—was one
of the main practical justifications for Christian iconophilism (love
of images).
In the series of Holy Faces, the most famous was the Mandylion, the
cloth on which Jesus was said to have imprinted his face in response
to a letter from King Abgar of Edessa, begging Christ to heal him
and requesting a portrait. This image was moved from Edessa to
Constantinople, and lost after the Fourth Crusade. There was also a
series of Shrouds, the most famous being the Shroud of Lirey, which
was taken to Chambéry, then to Turin in 1578. At the turn of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these images sparked a new
fervor, attracting pilgrims and inspiring numerous copies.
The Glory of Images. Rome, 1580–1660 From 1580 until the eighteenth century, building projects were
constantly under way in Rome. The first period in this extraordinary
transformation—until 1610, around the Jubilee Year of 1600–is
traditionally associated with the Counter Reformation. Like
architecture, religious images aimed to conform to the spirit of the
Council of Trent: to search for truth, rather than beauty.
The art of this transitional period, characterized by a rejection of
contour and color, was one of didactic narration and spatial clarity
with simplified or deliberately archaic forms, which soon progressed
toward greater naturalism. At the turn of the new century, the
rigorous search for truth with regard to religious history and nature
gave rise to two related but rival forms of artistic expression,
represented by Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio: nature seen as
essential and universal, or as ever-dependent on the contingency of
singular bodies.
Workshop of Philippe de Champaigne, The
Holy Face, musée du Louvre, on long-term
loan to Port-Royal © RMN-Grand Palais
(musée du Louvre) / Thierry Le Mage
Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin, musée du
Louvre © Vienne, Erich Lessing
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The Council of Trent’s decree on images gave no indication that the
work of this first generation—soon enriched by the return of
strength, color, and sensitivity—would result, around 1630, in an
even more triumphant form of art that revived the power and
enchantment of the image and was dedicated to the perpetual
glorification of a manifest God.
Nonetheless, this art maintained the contradiction inherent in the
image, which simultaneously reveals and veils the truth of the
Inaccessible. This is magnificently illustrated by the Cornaro Chapel
in Santa Maria della Vittoria, with Bernini’s sculpture of the
Transverberation (ecstasy) of Teresa of Ávila: all is visible, yet
absorbed in the abstraction of gold and marble, vanishing into the
secret encounter between the uncreated light of God and eyes that no
longer see.
The French School, Paris, 1627–1660 In the religious, political, intellectual, artistic, and literary fields, the
relationship between France and Italy was a blend of profound
affinity, proclaimed independence, and fundamental rivalry.
In ecclesiastical and spiritual matters particularly, France was
“Gallican,” i.e. opposed to the “ultramontane” influence (which
defended the spiritual and jurisdictional primacy of the Pope over the
political authority). The country was also deeply divided after half a
century of civil war, and French Catholicism had now to
accommodate the sensitivities of the Protestant minority.
Consequently, the prodigious flowering of mysticism and literature
that followed the pacification of the kingdom by the Edict of Nantes
was accompanied by a relatively discreet expression of the love of
images.
Those who showed the clearest support for the culture of the image
were the reformed Carmelites and the Jesuits—for whom Simon
Vouet produced the large altarpiece of the Presentation in the
Temple for the high altar of the Paris church of St. Louis. However,
the iconophilism of the French School also took many other forms.
Catholicism continued to be characterized by the love of images—
unchallenged even by the Jansenists—but in the work of artists such
as La Hyre, Le Sueur, or Philippe de Champaigne, it was expressed
with distance, discretion, immobility, restraint, and silence before the
infinite greatness of God.
Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin, musée du
Louvre © musée du Louvre, dist. RMN-Grand
Palais / Suzanne Nagy
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The Holy Sacrament For Catholics, the Eucharist represents the ultimate sacrament of
thanksgiving and a memorial of the Passion, but also the constant
actualization of Christ’s sacrifice and his real presence in the sacred
species.
The worship of the Holy Sacrament is a feature of the Catholic
Reformation and its iconography. Previous depictions of the Last
Supper, focusing on the moment when Jesus announced his betrayal
by Judas, were replaced by the Eucharistic Supper, at which Christ
as priest consecrates the bread and wine and gives communion to the
apostles.
The Church refuted the idea upheld by Byzantine iconoclasts and
taken up by Reformation thinkers—that the consecrated host was the
only true image of Christ—on the grounds that, as it was Christ’s
body, it could not properly be called an image. Nonetheless, the
Eucharist concerns the question of the image: despite being Christ’s
body, it presents something other than the appearance of his
sacrificed and broken body, given to be eaten—a sight which, as St.
Thomas Aquinas had observed, would have been truly unbearable.
The host, therefore, is not only Christ’s body, but his body with a
different, paradoxical image. “Tridentine” (from the Council of
Trent) liturgies and devotions, which worship the divine presence in
the Eucharist, exhibit and glorify it like an image, exalted by the sun
monstrance.
The Peasant Meal, attributed to Louis Le Nain, is one of the most
mysterious testimonies to the importance of the Blessed Sacrament
in seventeenth-century society. This painting is now associated with
the activity of Gaston de Renty, an eminent member of the Company
of the Blessed Sacrament, who organized Eucharistic suppers at his
home for the benefit of the poor, in whom the Church also sees the
hidden image of Jesus Christ. François Knaeps, Monstrance, Liège, Grand
Curtius © Ville de Liège-Grand Curtius