‘La plus éclatante victoire coûte trop cher’: (des)continuidades de matriz clássica na arte produzida durante o reinado de Luís XIV

Abstract

As is widely acknowledged, classical and mythological culture played a crucial role in constructing the “heroic” and military image of Louis XIV. Conversely, the second half of the Louis-Quatorzian government witnessed a paradigm shift, identified as the cause of the failure of art produced along these same formularies. Yet classical iconography never truly ceased to be instrumentalised but was rather astutely adapted to a new context of change. Focused on the iconographic and narrative decoding of a set of artistic objects associated with Louis XIV — respectively and recurrently linked with either the “first” or the “second” half of his reign — the main objective of this essay is to understand and contextualise the dynamics of interpretation, (re)adaptation, and continuity/discontinuity within classical artistic culture applied in this context.