In the event Charles proclaimed Louis XIV’s grandson Philip as his heir and French determination to take up his claim led to the War of Spanish Succession (1701–13). From 1701 on the Duke of Anjou, now known as Philip V, was based in Madrid. For the remainder of the war he fought for control of the Iberian Peninsula, backed by a Franco-Spanish army against Anglo-Portugese forces led by the Habsburg Archduke Charles, who styled himself Charles III. The heartland of Castile supported the new Bourbon king (though Philip knew very little about his adopted realm and did not even speak the language), while the provinces of Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia, always keen to assert their independence, favoured the Habsburg archduke. Despite French defeats elsewhere by the two main allied commanders, John Churchill, soon to become Duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy, and, although Philip was driven out of Madrid briefly in 1706, the war ended with the Bourbon faction in Spain in the ascendancy.
One of Philip V’s key supporters during the conflict was the French ambassador to Spain, Antoine V de Gramont, Duke of Guiche and later, Fourth Duke of Gramont, a veteran of Louis XIV’s wars against the Dutch. Gramont’s family already had a close connection with Spain. His grandfather Antoine III, Duke of Gramont, whose vain and boastful character was the inspiration for Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, had also served as French ambassador, arranging the marriage of Louis XIV and Maria-Teresa in 1659. Gramont was acting under instructions from Cardinal Mazarin who hoped that this marriage would lead to the union of the crowns of France and Spain, something that was to occur a generation later in 1700.
During the War of Spanish Succession, Philip resolved to thank his ambassador for his assistance by giving him a very special gift, some of the greatest works of art in the Spanish royal collection. The king chose three of Titian’s poesie: the Rape of Europa, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. Philip was a cultured man (he founded the National Library and the Royal Academy of History in Madrid), but he had little love of the visual arts, and had no compunction in disposing of these erotic works by Titian, formerly regarded by his art-loving Habsburg predecessors as some of the jewels in the collection.
The gift of works of art as a diplomatic counter was common practice among rulers. Philip IV had offered Titian’s poesie, including the Rape of Europa, to Charles, Prince of Wales, when he visited Madrid in 1623. In the same way, the set of four paintings of the Loves of the Gods by Correggio, containing similar subjects to Titian’s poesie, had been presented by Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, to his overlord the Emperor Charles V. One of the reasons why Philip V decided to give Gramont the Titians was because he knew how impressed the duke had been by the works of art in the Alcázar. Gramont gave a flattering description of the building:
What are admirable are the pictures that all the chambers are full of, and the superb tapestries, many more beautiful than those of the crown of France, of which this Catholic Majesty has 800 hanging in his furniture repository. Once I was compelled to say to Philip V, when I was an ambassador extraordinary to him, that he ought to sell 400 of them in order to pay his troops to fight the war, and that enough would still remain for him to furnish four palaces like this.
This was high praise coming from a man who had said of the royal palace at Aranjuez: ‘there isn’t a petit bourgeois on the outskirts of Paris who does not have one more comfortable, more beautiful, and more embellished.’
Despite the praise that Gramont lavished on the Alcázar, however, he does not seem to have shown much interest in the gift from the king, and, probably in 1768, he sold the three Titians on to Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who was about to become the greatest art collector in France (the two men had an intimate connection, since Gramont’s glamorous brother Guy Armand, Count of Guiche, said to be the handsomest man at the French Court, was reputed to have been the lover of both Philippe’s father the bisexual Philippe, younger brother of Louis XIV, and his mother Henrietta Anne, youngest daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria).
The Duke of Orléans had been born to the purple, a grandson of Louis XIII, a ‘petit-fils de France’ and ‘Prince of the Blood’, the highest rank in French society, indicating that he was descended in the male line from the sovereign, and a member of the immediate family of the king. He was treated with enormous respect, referred to as Monsieur le Prince, his household was paid for out of the revenue of the state and he was one of the very few permitted to sit in an armchair in the king’s presence, something regarded with the utmost importance at the class-conscious court of Louis XIV.
Good-natured, easy-going, generous to a fault and full of charm, Philippe was immensely popular at court. Highly intelligent and endowed with a prodigious memory, it seemed that the worldly-wise and pleasure-loving duke, who so closely resembled his ancestor Henry IV, was destined for great things. The problem was that the self-centred Louis (his motto was L’etat, c’est moi) disliked promoting people whom he deemed too capable, and the duke was compelled to attend court at Versailles but given little to do. In his minority Louis XIV had experienced the Fronde, a series of civil wars between 1648 and 1653 instigated by the nobility as a direct attack on the crown. Consequently, he was determined that no subject should ever be in a position to challenge his authority and one of his first acts on gaining his majority in 1660 had been to overthrow his over-mighty finance minister Nicolas Fouquet (Louis had no qualms, however, in using Fouquet’s architect Le Vau, his painter Le Brun and his gardener Le Notre, who had been working on Fouquet’s beautiful château at Vaux-le-Vicomte, on his own palaces).
Once he had built Versailles, Louis instructed his nobles to attend the court, where he could keep a close eye on them. This tactic succeeded in curtailing their power but it meant that they were obliged to neglect their country estates. In eighteenth-century England, in contrast, enlightened landowners such as Charles, Second Viscount Townshend, of Raynham Hall, Norfolk, pioneered new ideas of crop rotation, earning him the nickname ‘Turnip Townshend’. His neighbour Thomas Coke, First Earl of Leicester, of Holkham Hall, and Robert Bakewell, a farmer in Derbyshire, were highly successful in the selective breeding of new strains of cattle and sheep. There was no equivalent agricultural revolution in France where the aristocracy became completely detached from the countryside, leading to their growing unpopularity among the peasantry, something that was to have disastrous consequences in 1789.
Philippe, however, was finally permitted by his uncle to leave Versailles and join the army. He served with distinction on campaigns in the Spanish Netherlands in the 1690s where his left arm was badly damaged by a cannonball. During the War of the Spanish Succession Philippe fought in Italy in 1706 before being appointed commander-in-chief of the French forces in Spain in 1707. While in Madrid he lodged in the Alcázar when he was not on active service, and this gave the duke the opportunity to study the greatest paintings in the royal collection, including the Titians commissioned by Philip II. It was soon after his stay in Madrid that Gramont, no doubt aware of this, offered Philippe the Rape of Europa, together with Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto.
Orléans was shortly to become the most important figure in French politics. A great many of Louis XIV’s descendants had predeceased him, and, on the Sun King’s death in 1715, his heir was his great-grandson, also called Louis, born in 1710. Although he had been taught little in the ways of government by his uncle, Philippe was the outstanding candidate to become regent and, in 1715, after a short power struggle with his brother-in-law the Duke of Maine, son of Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan, he was appointed to the post. To ensure that he had full control of the young king, the regent brought him to Paris in 1716, where he was housed in the Tuileries Palace near the Palais-Royal, the main residence of the Dukes of Orléans, and the seat of government throughout the Regency of Louis XV. With the king and the regent living in close proximity, the area around the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries now replaced the Marais, fashionable since the time of Henry IV a century earlier, as the smart
est quarter in the city.
The Palais-Royal had enjoyed a prestigious history. Standing opposite the north wing of the Louvre, it was built by Jacques Lemercier in the 1630s for Louis XIII’s chief minister Cardinal Richelieu, who named it the Palais-Cardinal. Richelieu was a notable collector, creating a Gallery of Illustrious Men featuring portraits of great Frenchmen by Philippe de Champaigne and Simon Vouet. After the cardinal’s death the palace passed to Louis XIII, who renamed it the Palais-Royal. During the 1640s and 1650s it was the residence of the dowager queen, Anne of Austria, and her two young sons, Louis XIV and his younger brother Philippe, Duke of Orléans. During the 1650s it also housed Henrietta Maria, exiled widow of Charles I and sister of Louis XIII, and her daughter Henrietta Anne.
When Philippe married Henrietta Anne in 1661, the palace became the main residence of the House of Orléans, where the duke and duchess entertained the cream of French society and staged plays by Molière in Lemercier’s theatre, known as the Salle de Spectacles, one of the finest in Paris. The palace lost its pre-eminent position after Henrietta Anne’s death in 1670 (she was reputed to have been poisoned by her jealous, bisexual husband), but re-emerged as the centre of society in 1692 when Philippe’s son Philippe Charles, Duke of Chartres, married his cousin Francoise Marie de Bourbon, illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV, in the palace chapel. On the death of his father in 1701, the new Duke of Orléans, now First Prince of the Blood, and his wife took up permanent residence at the Palais-Royal. Since Louis XIV’s current mistress, the austere Madame de Maintenon, strongly disapproved of lavish entertainments at Versailles, Parisians flocked to the Palais-Royal, which was open to the public. The palace, adorned with marble and lacquer cabinets, the walls hung with Italian paintings and tapestries, had already earned a reputation as an artistic centre, staging exhibitions held by the Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
Philippe determined to redecorate the palace with no expense spared. The duke’s favourite architect was the talented Gilles-Marie Oppenord, who had returned from Italy in 1708, determined to replace the heavy Baroque decoration so popular under Louis XIV with a lighter style. Oppenord set to work, designing everything from wall panelling and chimneypieces to clocks, chandeliers, mirrors and candlesticks. The architect loved exuberance, filling panels and frames with an abundance of foliage, flowers, shells, birds, mythical animals and military trophies. Oppenord was to prove the leader of fashion, and his light and playful style, known as the Rococo or, more irreverently, the ‘salon et boudoir style’, ideally suited to the fun-loving regent, was to prove immensely popular.
Richelieu’s gallery had fallen into ruin, so a new one was constructed in 1702 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the architect of Versailles, known as the Gallery of Aeneas, with paintings by Antoine Coypel of the gods and goddesses of Olympus. Coypel was assisted in decorating the gallery by a number of pupils, including the artistically-minded duke himself. The end of the gallery was designed by Oppenord as a great triumphal arch. The painter developed a close relationship with his patron, and dedicated a series of lectures he gave at the Royal Academy to Philippe, in which he proposed that an aspiring painter ‘who wants to perfect his art’ must study and imitate the Old Masters in the Palais-Royal.
A second gallery in the palace, known as the Gallery of Orléans, comprised the extraordinary collection of paintings acquired by Philippe, numbering almost 500 works by his death in 1723. It rivalled the great royal collections of Europe, its fame greatly enhanced by the fact that it could be viewed by the public. The paintings were displayed in two suites of grand rooms running side-by-side down the west wing of the palace. The undoubted piece de resistance was a Galerie en Lanterne or Lanteron, a top-lit grand salon rising through two floors, and projecting on consoles over the rue de Richelieu. While musicians played from a balcony on the higher level, visitors could gaze in awe at the beauty of the ensemble.
This was where Philippe hung many of his finest paintings, including the Rape of Europa and two Diana paintings by Titian, alongside works by Raphael, Rubens and Annibale Carracci. When the duke instructed Oppenord to alter the interior in 1721, the Rape of Europa was moved to the imposing two-storey Grand Salon, which was the culmination of an enfilade facing the garden. The gallery was conceived as a grand vestibule, with Ionic pilasters, large mirrors and oval medallions, aligned on a great mirrored and gilt fireplace. This was a suitably grand setting for the best Venetian paintings in the Orléans Collection: masterpieces by Titian and Veronese, alongside works by Rubens.
Philippe took a keen interest in his collection and liked to re-hang paintings, so it is difficult to make a firm opinion about his taste. The grouping of colourists in the Grand Salon, works by Venetian masters and Rubens, seen as their heir, would indicate his preference for hanging paintings in particular schools. On the other hand, he also liked to mix them up, so that Georges Le Rouge, who wrote a guidebook to Paris in 1718, noted that versions of The Finding of Moses by Poussin and Veronese were hung side by side. The same occurred with versions of the Flight into Egypt by Pietro da Cortona and Jacopo Bassano. Subjects were also mixed up so that the lawyer Mathieu Marais, who wrote an account of the regency of Louis XV, was shocked that religious paintings were placed next to erotic nudes.
For most visitors the total effect was quite overwhelming. Masterpieces by the finest Old Masters hung alongside gilded sculptures and martial trophies, above commodes by Boulle, the greatest cabinet maker of the day, and lacquer cabinets filled with oriental porcelain. These splendid works of art were set against a sumptuous backdrop of panelling and crimson silk hangings. The overall impression was one of overwhelming luxury, with the stools and benches covered in gold-embroidered Gobelins tapestries, and a rock crystal chandelier illuminating the tables made of green Campagna marble.
In the Alcázar the Rape of Europa had been hidden from view, but the Palais-Royal, as splendid as any palace in Baroque Rome, was designed to proclaim Philippe’s dynastic status and was open to the public. Like the Spanish Habsburg kings, the Duke of Orléans was a great admirer of Titian’s paintings (he was to own three of the artist’s poesie: the two Diana paintings as well as the Rape of Europa), choosing his portrait of Philip II to hang in his bedchamber. His attitude towards collecting was more eclectic and he wanted to acquire the greatest paintings on the art market, regardless of their particular school.
A few years after acquiring the Titians, the regent began using Pierre Crozat, a prominent financier and passionate lover of the arts, as his agent. Crozat himself was to form one of the greatest art collections of the early eighteenth century. Crozat managed to acquire the best paintings that were available. There were an extraordinary number of works by the leading artists: 12 each by Raphael and Poussin, 25 by Annibale Carracci and 16 by Guido Reni (these artists were regarded as supreme practitioners of the classical school or the art of disegno). The collection was equally strong in the Venetian School (the art of colore), with 28 Titians, including the three paintings from his set of poesie, 16 works by Veronese and 12 by Tintoretto, as well as 19 by Rubens, the seventeenth-century artist most strongly influenced by the Venetians.
To acquire these masterpieces, Philippe was prepared to pay vast prices. The canons of Narbonne Cathedral were persuaded to part with the Resurrection of Lazarus by Titian’s Venetian contemporary Sebastiano del Piombo (National Gallery, London) for 24,000 livres, Raphael’s St John in the Desert (Uffizi, Florence) was purchased for 20,000 livres, the same sum paid for his Bolognese follower Annibale Carracci’s St Roch and the Angel (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Outside France Crozat purchased Poussin’s Seven Sacraments (National Gallery, Edinburgh) from the Chantelou collection in Holland for the enormous sum of 120,000 livres. Many of the most important works from the collection of Charles I, sold after his execution in 1649, had returned to France, where they were acquired by the regent, including Giulio Romano’s Infancy of Jupiter (National Gallery) and Rubens’ romantic Landscape with St George and the Dragon (He
r Majesty the Queen), where St George bore the features of Charles I and the princess those of his Queen, Henrietta Maria.
Crozat’s greatest coup, however, was the purchase for Philippe of the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden, including masterpieces by Raphael, Correggio, Titian and Rubens. The queen had benefited from the extraordinary success of the Swedish armies in the Thirty Years’ War, when they had sacked Prague and looted the collection of the Emperor Rudolph II, the most compulsive collector of the late sixteenth century. After Christina’s abdication from the Swedish throne in 1654 and her conversion to Catholicism (as the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, the champion of Protestantism during the Thirty Years’ War, this event sent shock waves through Europe), she took her collection of paintings with her to Rome, where she continued to acquire works by the great Italian Old Masters, notably the Colonna altarpiece (Metropolitan Museum, New York) by Raphael. To celebrate her conversion, Archduke Leopold William of Austria, ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, gave the queen Titian’s Death of Actaeon (National Gallery), a late mythological work similar in style to his poesie. After Christina’s death in 1689 her collection was bought by Don Livio Odescalchi, nephew of Innocent XI (Louis XIV had also been interested in acquiring it), whose heir the Duke of Bracciano sold it on to the Duke of Orléans for 358,000 francs.
The actual purchase of the collection was a long drawn-out affair, with Crozat competing with the Emperor Charles VI and Prince Eugene of Savoy. There was also the complication of securing a papal licence to export the works of art. When it seemed that Crozat might fail to secure the whole collection, Philipppe indicated that the paintings he most desired were the nudes by Titian and Correggio. Crozat was, however, successful, and the sale for the whole collection finally went through in 1721, the paintings on canvas were carefully rolled on to cylindrical drums and packed on board ship before sailing from Rome to the south of France. They finally reached Paris in December.
The Rape of Europa Page 10