INCHOATE THOUGHTS
Hi,
Of the many extraordinary sculptures
to be seen in the exhibition, Cast in Bronze:
French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution, at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York between February 24 and May 24, 2009 (earlier at the Musée
du Louvre, Paris, and between June 30
and September 27, 2009 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) is a strange
fragment. It is a left foot, wearing a sandal, fractured at the ankle so as to
reveal the bronze wall and a fill of clay core material. This is no ordinary
left foot. In the first place it is enormous: size 45 or thereabouts. And it is
not just anyone’s foot, or at least it represents not just anyone’s foot. Shod
in a Roman military sandal, it represents the left foot of King Louis XIV of
France (1638-1715).
This is the left foot from the
gigantic equestrian statue of the French king by François Giradon (1628-1715), unveiled on the Place Louis-Le-Grand
(Place Vendôme), Paris, on
August 13, 1699 as part of the visual art campaign used so thoroughly by
Louis’s government for royal aggrandizement. Like so much else associated with
the monarchy, the statue was destroyed during the French Revolution. Only the
left foot survives, and today it is in the collection of the Musée du Louvre.
We have an idea of the original appearance of the whole statue
thanks to engravings, and small-scale bronze versions. Girardon depicted the
king in Roman military garb, a common seventeenth-century means of investing a contemporary
ruler with the prestige of antiquity. Indeed, Girardon had worked and studied
in Rome in the 1640s. As one of the king’s favored artists, he had been given
quarters in the royal palace of the Louvre in 1667.
For the equestrian statue, a long-term project begun in 1685,
Girardon thought big, really big. Pride suggested that Louis’s likeness would
have to be larger than the great Roman statue on which all such equestrian
bronzes were based, that of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol in Rome. The casting
fell to the Swiss bronze founder Balthasar Keller (1638-1702), who realized it
in bravura fashion. It was so vast that during its installation twenty men are
said to have sat down to lunch inside the horse. The quantity of bronze used
was immense. The break at the ankle reveals not only clay core material that
fills the innards of the foot, but the sheer thickness of the wall of bronze
that forms it.
The sandal thongs expose the king’s toes—or at least those of
whoever modeled on his behalf. His pinkie is realistically squished from having
habitually worn other, more constraining (and more plausible) footwear.
Knowledgeable seventeenth-century viewers paid attention to such antiquarian
details as the accuracy of Roman military sandals. In a letter to Peter Paul
Rubens dated November 24, 1622, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637)
singles out for praise Rubens’s attention to the accurate representation of the
iron nails in the soles of a Roman cavalryman’s military sandal in the Collapse of the Milvian Bridge, one of
the cartoons for his tapestry series the Life
of the Emperor Constantine. French artists took pains to get the footwear
right when depicting Louis XIV as a Roman military leader. You can’t miss the
attention to his foot in the painting of the king on horseback crowned by a
flying Victory by Pierre Mignard (1612-1695),
Louis XIV Victorious at Maastricht,
1673 (Pinacoteca, Turin), or in the stucco high relief of 1681 by Antoine
Coysevox (1640-1720) in the Château de Versailles, Louis XIV Trampling his Enemies. Louis demanded deference from all.
His foot extends. Kiss it or be trampled, and when the king is on horseback as
a Roman emperor, it’s too late to pucker.
Some years ago, it seems, a full-size reproduction of Louis’s
foot, cast in aluminum, was available from the Louvre shop. A scan of the
online store at http://www.boutiquesdemusees.fr/en/shop/products/8-sculpture suggests that this is no longer
the case. Perhaps shipping is too much of a problem; or too many of the
customers were too weird even for tolerant French tastes. I prefer to think of
the foot not in fetishistic terms—although it clearly lends itself to such
attention—but rather as subject to the aesthetics of degradation. This
shattered remnant, revealing its rough inner core at the break, has become a
thing in its own right, a thing fractured by human violence, arrested on its
return to nature.
Inevitably, the king’s foot embodies a politics. The destruction
of the whole of which it was a part was a political gesture, a social act of
iconoclasm. Recent events have ensured that we are now all well aware of the
symbolic power not only of gigantic statuary representing political leaders,
but of the symbolic power of their destruction. The toppling of the monumental
statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on April 9, 2003, with the help of US
marines, signified not only the toppling of his regime, but revealed the
manipulative propaganda mechanisms of those who orchestrated and exploited the
event, no less than did the destruction of Girardon’s Louis XIV in 1793. Consider a reverse case. Those responsible
behaved no better than did those in the Soviet Union who, the story goes—and
whether true or apocryphal, it matters not—felt constrained to preserve flawed
casts of statues of Joseph Stalin: likenesses in bronze still recognizable, and
therefore impossible to destroy without evoking suspicion of treachery, so
retained in secret storage, a gallery of dictatorial deformity. And where, one
wonders, will Abraham Lincoln’s booted left foot from Daniel Chester French’s
giant memorial statue eventually end up?
Ever,
Ivan