A Feast from Le Grand Si

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the Metropolitan, the glory that was 17th century France

Some exhibitions cannot be done by the fainthearted; they can only be developed by great museums at their full organizational stretch. They alter the way art history is read, and "France in the Golden Age," which opened last month at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of these uncommon and persuasive events. It consists of 124 paintings by 17th century French artists, all culled from American collections. Some of them are among the household gods of the West, like Nicolas Poussin or Georges de La Tour; others, like Laurent de La Hyre or the extraordinary still-life painter Sebastien Stoskopff, are familiar only to specialists. The show was at the Grand Palais in Paris last winter, and will go to the Art Institute of Chicago this fall. It is the climax of a long re-evaluation of this period in French painting, carried out by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Its catalogue, by Pierre Rosenberg, conservator of paintings at the Louvre, is a model of lyrical scholarly enthusiasm--as is its long prefatory essay by the historian Marc Fumaroli.

The French still call the 17th century le grand siecle. During it, French culture reinvented itself, regaining the strength (if not the spirituality) it had in the Middle Ages. From the centralization of state power to the design of gardens, from the cult of literary "genius" to the rationalization of economic policy, its social tissue dilated with confidence. France's idea of itself as a nation bound by collective myths and a shared destiny had been precarious: it was rent by feudal squabbles, foreign invasion and civil war. Culturally, Paris in 1600 was little more than a colony of Italy; the Frenchman traveling south was made painfully aware that he came from a second-class power. "We are indeed the laughing stock of everybody, and none will take pity on us," Poussin morosely wrote from Rome in 1649. "We are compared to the Neapolitans and shall be treated as they were."

But the symbol and instrument of change was crowned at Reims five years later--the Sun King, Louis XIV, whose joining of a more than Roman gravitas to an insatiable desire for glory made him the central motif of French social myth and, so, of French culture. He was hailed as the new Caesar Augustus, the bringer of a literal "golden age" of peace and wealth. To celebrate this bewigged divinity, the right language was one of ideal form, majestic elocution and classical certainty: the diction of Imperial Rome brought up to date. This did not, of course, develop overnight, for great artists who bring such language do not simply materialize like good waiters when a monarch snaps his fingers. But by any standards, the cultural efflorescence around Louis XIV was astounding--among dramatists, Corneille, Racine and Moliere; among writers, La Rochefoucauld and La Fontaine; such architects as Mansart, Perrault and Le Vau; the garden-designer Lenotre, whose monument is the parks and parterres of Versailles. Louis XIV's ministers also set about creating or strengthening the institutions of official French culture, meant to raise art, writing and thought to a new level of prestige: the French Academy for literature, the Comedie Franc,aise for drama, the Royal Academy for painters and sculptors and the Academy of Sciences.

At the start of the 17th century, painting in France was not, on the whole, an instrument of state glory; it tended to be seen condescendingly as a manual business, a craft. The story of French art in this period is very largely that of painting's struggle to be seen on a level with literature or philosophy. This entailed confronting the source of all great artistic prototypes, Rome, which supplied models both antique and modern. The chief modern one was Caravaggio, who had died on a malarial Mediterranean beach at the start of the 17th century and left behind him a vast legacy of influence all over Europe. To paint commonplace models in tavern settings or caves of gloom, to infuse biblical subjects with an exacting realism and directness, to drive the mincing preciosity of late mannerism out of art--such were the aims of French Caravaggisti like Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632), whose Fortune Teller raises narrative to a pitch of ironic theater worthy of Caravaggio himself. It is a raffish image of tavern survival: the old circular comedy, as the gypsy woman bilks a credulous soldier while a man steals her chicken and a little girl lifts the thief's purse.

The best French painter to fall under Caravaggio's spell was, however, Georges de La Tour (1593-1652). His own Fortune Teller (the subject was perhaps bound to be popular in a country as worried about the future as early 17th century France) is condemned at the moment to a period of freakhood, thanks to 60 Minutes, which briefly rose from its usual torpor about cultural affairs to pillory it as a modern forgery. Reputable scholars agree, however, that there is no real question about The Fortune Teller's authenticity; its age has now been scientifically confirmed. It remains one of La Tour's masterpieces. Cleaned of grime and later repaints, it has a crispness and specificity of color, like taffeta in spring sunshine; and to see it in a room with seven other La Tours, including the Wrightsman Magdalen and The Musicians' Brawl, is to realize how the traits of style cited against it by detractors--the theatrical "unreality" of costume, the clear, generalized volumes of cylindrical arm or egg-shaped head--actually connect it to the rest of La Tour's oeuvre and help certify it as an autograph work.

La Tour probably never went to Rome; Nicolas Poussin, once he got there, rarely returned to France, although he was (in Rosenberg's words) "the greatest French painter of the 17th century--perhaps even the greatest French painter of all time." There are eleven Poussins in this show, and their cumulative effect has a Vergilian magnificence. The Death of Germanicus, 1626-28, in which the Roman general, allegedly poisoned by his adoptive father Tiberius, is seen exhorting his friends to avenge his death, is one of the supreme images of civic virtue in French art and Poussin's first full success in the heroic mode. One can dissect its mechanics--the contrasts between the masculine and feminine groups, the cross-quotations of pose and gesture that link the two, the brilliantly intelligent discretion with which Poussin used motifs from the antique--without losing touch with the deep emotions it conveys. Painterly language never strains against meaning: this is pure speech, not rhetoric. In the same way, Poussin's landscapes--as in the painting of St. John writing on Patmos--are grave and ample, the "Fair Champaign" of Milton's Paradise Regained:

Fertil of corn the glebe, oyl and wine,

With herds the pastures throng'd, with flocks the hills,

Huge Cities and high tow'r'd, that well might seem

The seats of mightiest Monarchs, and so large

The Prospect was, that here and there was room

For barren desert. . .

Nothing trivial can happen in this landscape; nature is didactic, chance has no place. Poussin's strenuous organization of its space, the carefully marked planes ranked across the canvas with no sudden plunges or corridors for the eye, was to become one of the fundamental ways of seeing landscape. It looks antique, but it was potentially modern. Its not-so-remote descendant would be the stony, planar monumentality of Cezanne's views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Three hundred years later, it seems to point toward the flatness of classical modernism. This may be an illusion, but it is hard to shake; in any case, painting of Poussin's order of greatness often seems to predict the future at the very moment of assimilating the past. If there were nothing but these Poussins in this show, one would need to see it. But there is, of course, so much else besides them that "France in the Golden Age" becomes what it is meant to be: a feast. --By Robert Hughes

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