Invitation For much of the 17th century, Bernini was regarded as the premier artist of the era, serving as the primary source of artistic works commissioned by
Pope Urban VIII. As a result, Louis XIV invited him to come to France to work in the name of the French monarchy. Bernini accepted this invitation, traveling to Paris to construct an
equestrian statue and a
portrait bust, as well as a
new façade of the
Louvre Palace.
Bernini in France The day after his arrival in Paris on June 3, 1665, Bernini concluded that the work that had been already done on the Louvre by
Louis Le Vau, a French
Classical Baroque architect who had been hired by Louis XIV, was inadequate, deciding instead to create his own designs, citing his own observations of palaces throughout his career. Bernini would eventually propose to abandon Le Vau’s ongoing project, instead insisting that he would provide the design details himself. Bernini's first concept for the planned east façade, which placed a heavy emphasis on curved wings in the Italian style, was almost immediately rejected.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert also stated that Bernini's plans to place the King's own room in the outwardly protruding central pavilion would be a noisy location due to its close proximity to the nearby street and foot traffic.
Construction and creation Bernini followed French tradition creating equestrian statues of French kings in their own residences, with notable examples by
François Mansart,
Charles Perrault, and Pierre Cottard. Despite tradition, Bernini was the first in France to design an equestrian statue to be freestanding with a rearing horse rather than attached to building. The precedent for this was
Pietro Tacca's sculpture of
Philip IV of Spain in the
Parque del Buen Retiro, Madrid (1642) which had been considered to be the first equestrian monument displaying a rearing rider since antiquity. The sun was also one of many symbols for Pope Urban VIII, Bernini’s greatest patron. In his time serving Urban VIII, Bernini was involved in the design of a frescoed vault within the
Palazzo Barberini in
Rome in which Divine Wisdom appears with the symbol of the sun on her breast.
Reception On 14 November 1685, Louis XIV saw the statue for the first time in the orangerie,
Philippe de Courcillon recorded that the King had resolved to remove the statue from the grounds and to destroy it. The statue, however, was not destroyed, but moved to another location on the main axis of the Orangerie, south of the pool. In September 1686, Bernini’s statue was displaced by
Domenico Guidi’s
La Renommee de Louis XIV. The statue was moved to a location on the far side of the newly constructed Neptune Basin, the most northern point on the north-south axis of the Garden. It was placed on a high pedestal. This location was not one of obscurity, but of prominence. In 1702, after the transformation from Louis XIV to
Marcus Curtius, the Roman hero, the statue was moved to the end of the Lake of the Swiss Guards at the opposite end of the palace grounds from the Basin of Neptune. The Statue was positioned near the pool, which symbolizes the abyss that Marcus Curtius throws himself into. Rather than being immediately rejected, the statue was actually placed in several areas of prominence over a 16-year period.
After Bernini's visit Following the failure of Bernini's stay in Paris, French attitudes toward Italian culture changed, a shift in attitude that for the first time since the Renaissance recognized that a national self-consciousness and self confidence north of the Alps had developed, an attitude that developed as a result of the rejection of the
Italian Baroque and the popularization of
French classicism, resulting in Bernini's redesign of the
Louvre Palace never rising above its foundations. == Culmination of themes in Bernini's work ==