Press Release

Exhibitions

A Season Devoted to the

Seventeenth Century

In spring 2015 the Musée du Louvre is showcasing the art of the

seventeenth century with three exhibitions: two at the Louvre

itself (“Poussin and God” and “Making Sacred Images”), the

third, “Velázquez,” at the Grand Palais.

The Louvre’s focus is therefore on the French “grand siècle,” with a

new look at its most famous painter, Nicolas Poussin, and his

religious paintings.

In connection with this first exhibition, a second presentation (in the

same part of the museum) aims to shed light on the nature and

creation of sacred images in Rome and Paris, two cities where

Poussin lived and worked in a century that was profoundly marked

by religious conflict and spiritual revival.

In coproduction with the RMN-GP (Réunion des Musées Nationaux-

Grand Palais) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, the

Louvre is also presenting the first monographic exhibition in France

devoted to Velázquez, an outstanding artist described by Manet as

“the painters’ painter.”

Poussin and God Musée du Louvre / Hall Napoléon

April 2–June 29, 2015

Exhibition Curators : Nicolas Milovanovic, Department of Paintings,

musée du Louvre, and Mickaël Szanto, Paris Sorbonne University

Making Sacred Images: Rome–Paris (1580–1660) Musée du Louvre / Hall Napoléon

April 2–June 29, 2015

Exhibition Curators : Louis Frank, Department of Prints and

Drawings, and Philippe Malgouyres, Department of Decorative Arts,

musée du Louvre

Velázquez

Grand Palais / Galeries Nationales

March 25–July 13, 2015

Exhibition Curator: Guillaume Kientz, Department of Paintings,

musée du Louvre

RMN-GP Press Contact: Florence Le Moing

florence.le-moing@rmngp.fr / +33 (0)1 40 13 47 62

External Relations Department Press contact

Anne-Laure Béatrix, Director Céline Dauvergne

Adel Ziane, Head of Communication Subdepartment celine.dauvergne@louvre.fr -Tél. +33 (0)1 40 20 84 66

Sophie Grange, Head of Press Division

Nicolas Poussin, The Annunciation (detail)

© The National Gallery, Londres, Dist. RMN-Grand

Palais / National Gallery Photographic Department

Guido Reni, Christ with the Reed (détail) musée du

Louvre © RMN - Grand Palais (musée du

Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

Diego Velázquez, María Teresa (1638–1683),

Infanta of Spain © The Metropolitan Museum of

Art, dist. Rmn-Grand Palais / Malcom Varon

Press Release

Exhibition

April 2–June 29, 2015

Hall Napoléon

Making Sacred Images Rome–Paris, 1580–1660

The great reform movement that shook the Church in the

sixteenth century comprised a profound reflection on the nature

of sacred images, fiercely attacked by the Protestants.

With some 85 works (prints and drawings, paintings, objets

d’art, sculptures), “Making Sacred Images” aims to explore the

complex issues at the heart of the religious art created by the

greatest seventeenth-century painters, sculptors, and architects,

such as Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Gian

Lorenzo Bernini, and Pietro da Cortona in Rome, and Simon

Vouet, Eustache Le Sueur, Philippe de Champaigne, or the Le

Nain brothers in Paris.

Following the upheaval of the religious crisis and the

stabilization of the Catholic and Protestant positions, the Church

of Rome undertook its own reform. This is most impressively

illustrated by the Council of Trent (1545–1563) which

reaffirmed, for instance, the possibility, legitimacy, and

usefulness of sacred images, profoundly and brutally attacked by

the Protestants.

This was the backdrop against which artists and their clients

reflected on how to make new images that would be acceptable:

how could such images be created and what was the artist’s role

in the process? It was admitted that Christ or the Virgin Mary

could be represented as they were incarnate, but how could they

be given features when their faces were unknown? Could artists

invent such images and give them validity in the eyes of

believers?

The religious crisis of the sixteenth century saw a revival of the

campaign against images. From the 1520s onward, this led to the

reappearance of a virulent iconoclasm which found its fullest

expression in France and the Netherlands in the 1560s. The Catholic

Church was quick to act in defense of images, particularly at the

twenty-fifth and final session of the Council of Trent in December

1563.

After a brief period of reaction, Italian religious art was restructured

in the 1580s according to the principles of devout purity and truth.

This sparked an unexpected revival resulting in a movement of

incomparable richness. Our presentation, resonating with the

exhibition “Poussin and God,” aims to illustrate two related but rival

visions: that of Rome, where the love of images was given

triumphant expression, and that of Paris, where the peaceful

coexistence of Catholics and Protestants after the Edict of Nantes

gave rise to a more restrained, less theatrical but equally rich form of

artistic expression.

Exhibition catalogue edited by Louis

Frank and Philippe Malgouyres.

Co-published by Somogy Editions d’Art

and Musée du Louvre Editions. With the

support of Arjowiggins Graphic.

Guido Reni, Christ with the Reed (détail)

musée du Louvre © RMN - Grand Palais

(musée du Louvre) / Stéphane Maréchalle

Exhibition Curators

Louis Frank, Department of Prints and

Drawings, and Philippe Malgouyres,

Department of Decorative Arts, Musée du

Louvre

External Relations Department Press contact

Anne-Laure Béatrix, Director Céline Dauvergne

Adel Ziane, Head of Communication Subdepartment celine.dauvergne@louvre.fr -Tél. +33 (0)1 40 20 84 66

Sophie Grange, Head of Press Division

Central to the exhibition is the significance of the Christian love of

images. In Christianity, God took on the face and body of a man,

thereby lending himself to the image: this is the Church’s age-old

argument to justify the presence and veneration of sacred images.

And at a deeper level, the Christian God has, in himself, the nature

of an Image.

The exhibition is presented in four thematic sections that explore the

principal issues raised by the making of sacred images in the

seventeenth century. It begins with one of the main Catholic

arguments for the legitimate existence of images: if Jesus left

imprints of his face and body for men to see, then God approves of

images. The following sections introduce two different,

complementary realities: triumphant papal Rome in the period

around the great Jubilee (Holy) years of 1600, 1625, and 1650; and

Paris, the mirror of a country scarred by the divisions of the religious

wars, where the Church was seeking independence from the papacy.

The exhibition concludes with a section on the Eucharist and the

Blessed Sacrament, which acquired greater importance in the

seventeenth century and is explored here in its dimension as a sign

and ultimate image.

Images “Not Made by Hands” The tradition of “acheiropoieta”—images “not made by hands” and

said to have been imprinted by the body or face of Christ—was one

of the main practical justifications for Christian iconophilism (love

of images).

In the series of Holy Faces, the most famous was the Mandylion, the

cloth on which Jesus was said to have imprinted his face in response

to a letter from King Abgar of Edessa, begging Christ to heal him

and requesting a portrait. This image was moved from Edessa to

Constantinople, and lost after the Fourth Crusade. There was also a

series of Shrouds, the most famous being the Shroud of Lirey, which

was taken to Chambéry, then to Turin in 1578. At the turn of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these images sparked a new

fervor, attracting pilgrims and inspiring numerous copies.

The Glory of Images. Rome, 1580–1660 From 1580 until the eighteenth century, building projects were

constantly under way in Rome. The first period in this extraordinary

transformation—until 1610, around the Jubilee Year of 1600–is

traditionally associated with the Counter Reformation. Like

architecture, religious images aimed to conform to the spirit of the

Council of Trent: to search for truth, rather than beauty.

The art of this transitional period, characterized by a rejection of

contour and color, was one of didactic narration and spatial clarity

with simplified or deliberately archaic forms, which soon progressed

toward greater naturalism. At the turn of the new century, the

rigorous search for truth with regard to religious history and nature

gave rise to two related but rival forms of artistic expression,

represented by Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio: nature seen as

essential and universal, or as ever-dependent on the contingency of

singular bodies.

Workshop of Philippe de Champaigne, The

Holy Face, musée du Louvre, on long-term

loan to Port-Royal © RMN-Grand Palais

(musée du Louvre) / Thierry Le Mage

Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin, musée du

Louvre © Vienne, Erich Lessing

The Council of Trent’s decree on images gave no indication that the

work of this first generation—soon enriched by the return of

strength, color, and sensitivity—would result, around 1630, in an

even more triumphant form of art that revived the power and

enchantment of the image and was dedicated to the perpetual

glorification of a manifest God.

Nonetheless, this art maintained the contradiction inherent in the

image, which simultaneously reveals and veils the truth of the

Inaccessible. This is magnificently illustrated by the Cornaro Chapel

in Santa Maria della Vittoria, with Bernini’s sculpture of the

Transverberation (ecstasy) of Teresa of Ávila: all is visible, yet

absorbed in the abstraction of gold and marble, vanishing into the

secret encounter between the uncreated light of God and eyes that no

longer see.

The French School, Paris, 1627–1660 In the religious, political, intellectual, artistic, and literary fields, the

relationship between France and Italy was a blend of profound

affinity, proclaimed independence, and fundamental rivalry.

In ecclesiastical and spiritual matters particularly, France was

“Gallican,” i.e. opposed to the “ultramontane” influence (which

defended the spiritual and jurisdictional primacy of the Pope over the

political authority). The country was also deeply divided after half a

century of civil war, and French Catholicism had now to

accommodate the sensitivities of the Protestant minority.

Consequently, the prodigious flowering of mysticism and literature

that followed the pacification of the kingdom by the Edict of Nantes

was accompanied by a relatively discreet expression of the love of

images.

Those who showed the clearest support for the culture of the image

were the reformed Carmelites and the Jesuits—for whom Simon

Vouet produced the large altarpiece of the Presentation in the

Temple for the high altar of the Paris church of St. Louis. However,

the iconophilism of the French School also took many other forms.

Catholicism continued to be characterized by the love of images—

unchallenged even by the Jansenists—but in the work of artists such

as La Hyre, Le Sueur, or Philippe de Champaigne, it was expressed

with distance, discretion, immobility, restraint, and silence before the

infinite greatness of God.

Caravaggio, The Death of the Virgin, musée du

Louvre © musée du Louvre, dist. RMN-Grand

Palais / Suzanne Nagy

The Holy Sacrament For Catholics, the Eucharist represents the ultimate sacrament of

thanksgiving and a memorial of the Passion, but also the constant

actualization of Christ’s sacrifice and his real presence in the sacred

species.

The worship of the Holy Sacrament is a feature of the Catholic

Reformation and its iconography. Previous depictions of the Last

Supper, focusing on the moment when Jesus announced his betrayal

by Judas, were replaced by the Eucharistic Supper, at which Christ

as priest consecrates the bread and wine and gives communion to the

apostles.

The Church refuted the idea upheld by Byzantine iconoclasts and

taken up by Reformation thinkers—that the consecrated host was the

only true image of Christ—on the grounds that, as it was Christ’s

body, it could not properly be called an image. Nonetheless, the

Eucharist concerns the question of the image: despite being Christ’s

body, it presents something other than the appearance of his

sacrificed and broken body, given to be eaten—a sight which, as St.

Thomas Aquinas had observed, would have been truly unbearable.

The host, therefore, is not only Christ’s body, but his body with a

different, paradoxical image. “Tridentine” (from the Council of

Trent) liturgies and devotions, which worship the divine presence in

the Eucharist, exhibit and glorify it like an image, exalted by the sun

monstrance.

The Peasant Meal, attributed to Louis Le Nain, is one of the most

mysterious testimonies to the importance of the Blessed Sacrament

in seventeenth-century society. This painting is now associated with

the activity of Gaston de Renty, an eminent member of the Company

of the Blessed Sacrament, who organized Eucharistic suppers at his

home for the benefit of the poor, in whom the Church also sees the

hidden image of Jesus Christ. François Knaeps, Monstrance, Liège, Grand

Curtius © Ville de Liège-Grand Curtius