Le salon d’Hercule à Versailles

• Main Author: Claire Mazel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles 2018-04-01
• Series: Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles
• Subjects: Versailles; painting; 18th century; reception; public; mythology
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/crcv/14793

With its marble decoration begun in 1712 and its mythological ceiling, inaugurated in 1736, the Hercules Salon at Versailles appears to be in line with the Versailles of Louis XIV. However nothing could be further from the truth. First of all the phenomenon Gérard Sabatier described, of a progressively cultural use of monarchical programmes – which quickly outweighed any other, of a “museum use” of Versailles – found its extension in this salon, which exhibited to visitors its beautiful marbles, two Veronese paintings and the great composition by François Lemoyne. Then the separation between the sovereign’s representation and allegorical glorification became more profound. Paradoxically the growing indifference towards the political message in favour of only the artistic interest, the “twilight of symbolic images”, may explain why until now there has been no sense of the revolution that was the subject’s substitution for the sovereign in the identification of the mythological portrait: in 1736 it was not the prince hidden behind Hercules but the man in the service of his king and his country, that is to say, his subject.