A luminous exhibition at the Palace of Versailles commemorates the three hundred years of the coronation of the Beloved and, incidentally, the return of the Court to the golden prison imagined for it by the Sun King.
The 400 works of art, sculptures and paintings presented by
Louis XV, the passions of a king
will comfort souls wounded by the gloom of our times.
They will sweep away the hideous and garish reliefs of consumerism in its decline.
And that's good !
The exhibition confesses to no other purpose than to evoke an apogee of taste.
A conquering apogee, because the “great French taste” was then exported throughout Europe;
our decorative arts and the know-how that goes with it have, more or less, survived from his credit until the Second World War.
There is therefore no question here of retracing the paradoxes of the reign, nor its sometimes disastrous vagaries, of which, too often, for too long, Louis XV was only the melancholy witness.
Some of the most brilliant historians – Gaxotte, Antoine…
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