Tea at Trianon: The Sistine Tapestries

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The Sistine Tapestries

Woven into the fabric of the Church.

Imagine a first-time-ever, five-week museum exhibition with a subject as familiar as Raphael (1483-1520). That's what London's Victoria & Albert Museum is serving up, displaying four of the master's Sistine Chapel tapestries alongside the museum's own cartoons (i.e., immense drawings created as models) for those grand woven works. Even Raphael never got to see his paintings, depicting scenes from the lives of St. Peter and St. Paul, next to the finished tapestries.

Commissioned by Lorenzo de'Medici's son, Pope Leo X , in 1515, the tapestries followed the earlier Sistine Chapel decorations, including Michelangelo's renowned ceiling frescoes, commissioned by Leo X's predecessor, Julius II. Seven of the woven works were unveiled in the Sistine Chapel with great ceremony in 1519, and due to the tapestries' fragility the Vatican's entire set of 10 is displayed only on special occasions.