Tea at Trianon: Scale Model Cities

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

Monday, January 30, 2012

Scale Model Cities

Made for the Kings of France.

When defending his realm, Louis XIV not only thought big, but he also worked in visionary 3D. In 1668, his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois, commissioned a large relief map of the port city of Dunkirk to be used in planning the city's fortifications. Others followed—huge exact-scale models of frontier cities and their surroundings—hills, gullies, rivers, forests, villages, roads, farms—that might sustain an enemy siege. The royal collection of scale-model cities grew under Louis XV, Louis XVI and both Napoleons, until modern warfare, post-1870, made them obsolete. Of the original 260, some 100 have survived, most housed in their own museum in the Hôtel des Invalides—28 on display, the rest stored in pieces.

Sixteen models from the reserves, some never before shown in public, have been re-assembled under the immense glass-roofed nave of the Grand Palais for "La France en Reliefs"—a spectacular, beautifully mounted, must-see show.(Read entire post.)