Bernini in France

The popes and their brother sovereigns unapologetically used the arts to project their power and status. As the political philosopher Montesquieu put it in the next century, ‘The magnificence and splendour which surround kings form part of their power.’

This awareness was taken to new extremes by Louis XIV, who allowed himself to be portrayed as Apollo the Sun God, as Hercules, as Alexander the Great, as the Good Shepherd, as St Louis, and to be praised in poetry and prose and through architecture, sculpture and the striking of commemorative medals.  Now Louis was determined that Europe’s most celebrated artist should add to his ‘magnificence and splendour’: he wanted Bernini in Paris.

This was not the first time that the French had tried to commandeer the talents of Rome’s great image maker. As early as 1643, Mazarin, at the behest of Louis XIII, did his best to entice Bernini north. Pope Urban, Bernini’s principal employer at the time, said absolutely not. In his words, Bernini ‘had been made for Rome and Rome for him’. But the balance of power had changed considerably by the time the next Louis invited Bernini to France.

The immediate pretext for Bernini’s trip was to design improvements to the Louvre, which was then the monarch’s principal residence. First, drawings were sent, but then Louis began demanding, in the politest terms, that Bernini himself was needed in Paris. On 11 April 1665, Louis wrote to the artist that ‘I bear such singular esteem for your merit that my desire is indeed great to see and come to know closer at hand so illustrious a personage.’ Delay was no longer possible. Just over a fortnight later Bernini set off from Rome with a small entourage. The papal court feared he might never return, given the potential rigours of the journey for the ageing artist, not to mention the further blandishments Louis might offer him when once arrived in France.

As they made their way towards Paris, the travellers were entertained lavishly and large crowds gathered to welcome them, as well as gawp at the exotic arrival. Bernini himself described the progress sardonically as ‘the elephant was then travelling around’. But against all expectations the five-month stay in Paris was not a success. Bernini’s plans for the Louvre were comprehensively rejected by Colbert, the king’s first minister and fixer-in-chief. The proposed improvements, Colbert declared, were lacking in comfort, security and grandeur.

Bernini didn’t help matters either, continually belittling French taste and talent, remarking for example that the decoration of Paris churches reminded him ‘how poor and feeble French style was’. When Colbert’s assistant Charles Perrault criticised Bernini’s Louvre design, the Italian exploded. ‘It is not for the likes of you, Monsieur Perrault, to make objections of this kind,’ he harrumphed. ‘You may have some understanding of the uses of a palace, but the design is the concern of someone more skilled than you are. You are not worthy to brush the dust off my shoes.’

When he left Paris at the end of October, there must have been relief all around. Bernini continued, largely I think as a face-saving exercise, to provide drawings for the Louvre, none of which were used. It wasn’t until over ten years later, in 1677, that he finished and had delivered to France a large equestrian statue of Louis, commissioned as a kind of consolation prize. Bernini had never attempted anything comparable apart from the statue of the Emperor Constantine in the Vatican, so it was a signal honour that he was allowed to make the statue for Louis; but in the event the King hated it so much that he had it partially recarved and installed in an obscure part of the gardens at Versailles.

By far the most successful result of the trip was Bernini’s magisterial bust of Louis, also now at Versailles, in which the Sun King emerges from a fantastic swirl of drapery. It’s a defining and glamorous image of the absolute monarch who tormented Pope Alexander and provided Bernini with his greatest failure.

This is an edited extract from An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, the pope and the Making of the Eternal City (Pallas Athene)