x.vi. ART AS A SOCIAL WEAPON

 

A MESSAGE THAT ALL UNDERSTOOD

After a painting of the Fontainebleau school (toward 1550)

Diane de Poitiers, member of the top nobility and favorite of Henri II, as Diana, goddess of the hunt.

• Nobles, gods and heroes : Figures from Antiquity represent nobles.

• Real-life stories and political messages: the décor of mansions and châteaux  

• Rubens's decor for a queen: the series for Marie de Médicis, the first modern biography.

• Allegory: a plea for peace and a threat of revolt

• An arc of triumph heralds three centuries of calamity... The homage to Louis XIV at the Saint-Denis gate.

• The violent imagery of victors on horseback

• Heroes on white horses

• The first great work of defiance: The Raft of the Medusa

• A goddess becomes a plebeian revolutionary: Liberty guides the people

• Freedom's great painting, fervent but ambiguous: same

• The goddess's descendants 

• Ballet, an art of the French court 

• A ceiling decorated by an orgy: the Opéra

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• Faceless poor and bourgeois heroes: the Revolution of 183

• Millionaires and ballerinas: the Opéra

• The City Museum's sole proletarian seen full face (at the end of the page) 

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Next,

 Outskirts, cauldrons of the arts