Cupola of Château de Sceaux – after Charles Le Brun, 1710-1724
€3.150
GOD THE FATHER IN A GLORY OF ANGELS – THE LOST DOME OF SCEAUX, 1681
“Pater Aeternus sedens super pennas Angelorum, haec verba in Baptismate Iesu Christi proferens, Hic est Filius meus dilectus &c.” [The Eternal Father, borne on the wings of angels, speaks at the Baptism of Jesus Christ the words: ‘This is my beloved Son’, etc.]. Monumental circular engraving, composed of five separately printed sheets, made by Johann Jacob Kleinschmidt (c. 1688–1772) and published by Jeremias Wolff (1663–1724) around 1710–1724. Kleinschmidt closely copied the five-sheet etching and engraving made by Gérard Audran in 1681, which in turn reproduced Charles Le Brun’s design for the ceiling of the chapel at the Château de Sceaux. Coloured by a later hand. Diameter: 116 cm.
At the centre, in a sea of light, God the Father appears borne aloft by angels and surrounded by a heavenly host. Around Him, dozens of angels hover, play music and worship. The painted balustrade around the edge of the dome heightens the illusion that the heavens are opening above the viewer.
The composition represents the fulfilment of the Old Law by the New. Among the angels, the seven-branched menorah and the Ark of the Covenant are carried away, both symbols of the Old Covenant. At the centre, God the Father proclaims the words heard from heaven, according to the Gospel, at the Baptism of Christ: “This is my beloved Son”. The composition thus links the Old Testament with the coming of Christ and the New Covenant.
Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), Premier Peintre du Roi to Louis XIV, was one of the defining artists of French Classicism. As painter, designer and artistic director, he played a central role in the decoration of, among other projects, Versailles. Gérard Audran (1640–1703) was one of the foremost engravers to reproduce Le Brun’s monumental compositions in print. Kleinschmidt produced his version in Augsburg, probably between c. 1710 and 1724. Rather than making a reduced adaptation, he re-engraved Audran’s five-sheet composition on a new set of copperplates in the same monumental scale.
Le Brun created the dome decoration for the chapel at Sceaux in 1674 for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the powerful minister of Louis XIV and owner of the estate. The chapel stood at the end of the château’s left wing.
During the French Revolution, the estate was confiscated as national property in 1793. The old château was dismantled in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the chapel and Le Brun’s celebrated ceiling painting disappeared around 1801. Audran’s prints as well as Kleinschmidt’s copies are therefore not merely a reproduction after Le Brun, but also the most important visual records of a lost masterpiece of seventeenth-century French decorative art.
Price: Euro 3.150,-
SOLD
