The Fountain of Latona : : Louis XIV, Charles Le Brun, and the Gardens of Versailles / / Thomas F. Hedin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Arts 2022
• VerfasserIn: Hedin, Thomas F.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 p.) :; 80

Ovid tells the story of Latona, the mother by Jupiter of Apollo and Diana. In her flight from the jealous Juno, she arrives faint and parched on the coast of Asia Minor. Kneeling to sip from a pond, Latona is met by the local peasants, who not only deny her effort but muddy the water in pure malice. Enraged, Latona calls a curse down upon the stingy peasants, turning them to frogs.In his masterful study, Thomas F. Hedin reveals how and why a fountain of this strange legend was installed in the heart of Versailles in the 1660s, the inaugural decade of Louis XIV’s patronage there. The natural supply of water was scarce and unwieldy, and it took the genius of the king’s hydraulic engineers, working in partnership with the landscape architect André Le Nôtre, to exploit it. If Ovid’s peasants were punished for their stubborn denial of water, so too the obstacles of coarse nature at Versailles were conquered; the aquatic iconography of the fountain was equivalent to the aquatic reality of the gardens.Latona was designed by Charles Le Brun, the most powerful artist at the court of Louis XIV, and carried out by Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy. The 1660s were rich in artistic theory in France, and the artists of the fountain delivered substantial lectures at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on subjects of central concern to their current work. What they professed was what they were visualizing in the gardens. As such, the fountain is an insider’s guide to the leading artistic ideals of the moment.Louis XIV was viewed as the reincarnation of Apollo, the god of creativity, the inspiration of artists and scientists. Hedin’s original argument is that Latona was a double declaration: a glorification of the king and a proud manifesto by artists.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Measurements -- List of Illustrations -- Prologue -- Chapter 1. Foundations -- Chapter 2. Fountains in Context -- Chapter 3. Original State -- Chapter 4. Visual Narrative -- Chapter 5. Latona Group -- Chapter 6. Lycean Peasants -- Chapter 7. Panegyric and Manifesto -- Epilogue -- Appendix A. Execution of the Fountain -- Appendix B. Mansart’s Marble Cone -- Appendix C. Marsy’s Lecture of 7 December 1669 -- Appendix D. Nathan Whitman’s “Fronde Thesis” -- Appendix E. Translations of Ovid -- Appendix F. Elaborations of the Western Axis, Briefly -- List of Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index