The state has acquired for 2.3 million euros a scale model of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV kept in a British private collection and intended for the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, the Ministry of Culture announced on Wednesday.
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Sculpted by Antoine Coysevox (1640-1720), one of the most important sculptors of the reign of Louis XIV, and recognized as being of major heritage interest, the 94 cm high statuette rests on a 120 cm pedestal which dates of the 19th century.
It is temporarily on display at the Louvre Museum and will definitely join the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes in September, where the two reliefs of the pedestal executed by Coysevox in 1693 for the original statue have been kept since the 19th century.
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The latter, 4 meters high, was designed between 1688 and 1689. Initially intended for the city of Nantes, it was finally Rennes that welcomed it on July 6, 1726 on the new Place du Palais (now hui place du Parlement), a few years after the reconstruction work following the great fire of 1720. Beaux-Arts since its foundation in 1801.
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The creation of this statue in homage to Louis XIV in Brittany was part of the king's desire to impose an image of the central state in the largest cities in France (such as Bordeaux, Lyon, etc.) and in a particularly complex Breton context after the revolt of the stamped paper of 1675. To punish Rennes for having taken part in it, Louis XIV ordered the transfer of the Parliament of Brittany to Vannes the same year, where it would sit until 1690.
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Preserved for more than a century in a British aristocratic collection, the bronze reduction is today the only testimony in volume of the famous monumental statue of Coysevox, until then only known through an engraving made by the architect Jean -Francois Huguet.