Piety and Politics: Imaging Divine Kingship in Louis XIV's Chapelat Versailles

Louis XIV’s chapel at the palace of Versailles was finished, after twenty-eight years in the making, in 1710. The visitor to the chapel, then as now, would be confronted by an overwhelming profusion of decoration on the interior: illusionistic painting, marble marquetry, relief sculpture and a magnificent altar and organ. The visitor today would be cognizant that this was a royal palace built for Louis XIV and would logically assume that the iconography of the decorations somehow glorifies Louis XIV as a divinely ordained monarch. In her book, Piety and Politics: Imaging Divine Kingship in Louis XIV’s Chapel at Versailles, Martha Mel Stumberg Edmunds reveals the chapel as it might have been experienced and understood by the eighteenth-century visitor. Edmunds unravels the complex fabric of the chapel’s creation and decoration, and she provides a context for understanding the individual strands and how they relate one to another within the whole. The modern visitor, after reading Edmunds’s book, will understand the nuances of why and how the chapel deifies and glorifies Louis XIV and the institution of the French monarchy. Edmunds demonstrates through careful scholarship, archival research, and acute visual analysis that the structure and its embellishment is less overwhelming than it is carefully orchestrated. According to Edmunds, the chapel exhibits a great conceptual unity that could not have been simply the result of chance, as some have argued.

Edmunds provides a historical and theoretical frame for understanding the chapel; she reconstructs the chronology of its creation and construction; she painstakingly examines the individual elements both formally and iconographically; and she interprets both the individual elements and their place within the whole. One of her accomplishments is the meshing of a microscopic view, a close examination of specific visual and textual imagery, and a macroscopic view, the larger historical context that frames an interpretation of the specific. The organization of the book reflects this interweaving.

The book is divided into an introduction, six chapters, and a useful appendix containing an inventory of the Versailles chapel. In the first chapter, “Sacred Kingship, Sacred King: The Role of Religion for Louis XIV,” Edmunds sets up this larger interpretive framework and introduces a number of themes surrounding divine kingship and Louis XIV. Edmunds explicates for the modern reader what would have been a commonly understood mythology of Louis as divine king.

This mythology exploited past lore, reinforcing the links between Louis XIV and the Bourbon kings’ exalted heritage reaching back to Charlemagne and to their patron saint, St. Louis. Edmunds discusses Louis XIV’s religious education, beliefs, and practices and how some of these practices played into this mythology. For example, the Maundy Thursday ceremony in which Louis XIV washed and kissed the feet of thirteen poor children, which commemorated Christ’s washing of St. Peter’s feet at the Last Supper. This chapter also presents Louis XIV as a dedicated leader of the church who fought against heresy, a theme reinforced throughout the chapel’s decoration. Edmund presents historical events, such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes or the tensions between France and Rome that would have informed the building, experience, and meaning of the chapel. In this chapter, and throughout the rest of the book, Edmunds provides a wide variety of comparative visual and textual sources that collectively bring to life the complexity of the mythology of divine kingship.

In chapter 2, “Versailles Chapel and Louis XIV’s Patronage of Religious Architecture,” Edmunds examines the past precedents and patterns of meaning that might have influenced the Versailles chapel. The Versailles chapel would have been seen in relation to the long tradition of ecclesiastical architecture associated with palaces—Charlemagne’s Palatine Chapel in Aachen, Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and even Solomon’s temple—and Edmunds points out the often subtle references to these past chapels. Edmunds relates the chapel to other contemporary projects and the architectural elements that had become signatures for Louis XIV’s building projects.

In the third and fourth chapters, “Creating a Worthy Monument: Le Lieu le plus magnifique de ce somptueux & brilliant palais” and “Completing the Chapel: Paintings, Sculpture, Altars, and Furnishings,” Edmunds reconstructs the evolution of the chapel over the course of twenty-eight years. These two chapters represent a feat of archival research, and they bring to life the complexity and messiness of this large-scale, collaborative project carried out under the direction of the Bâtiments du Roi.

Edmunds discusses the various plans for the chapel—there were lots of them—and offers explanations for why changes were made; her careful scholarship clearly distinguishes between explanations of changes based on documentary evidence and informed speculation. For example, in 1689 there was a shift from a central plan with a dome to a longitudinal plan and no document to justify this change. Edmunds argues that the central plan with a dome would have been too closely tied to St. Peter’s and to the Invalides, and that the longitudinal plan would have made a link with royal medieval precedents like Sainte-Chapelle.

In the fourth chapter Edmunds examines the welter of ornament in the same meticulous manner. She organizes this chapter according to the type of decoration—relief sculpture, painting, and so on—and its location within and without the chapel. With such a profusion of decoration this organization allows the reader to perceive an underlying sense of structure in the arrangement of the decoration, especially in relation to the larger architectural bones of the building. Edmunds also discusses the iconography of the decorative work, and as she does, the reader begins to piece together the unity of the chapel’s overall theme.

In chapters 5 and 6, “Christian Themes and Divine Kingship: The Significance of the Decoration in the Versailles Chapel” and “The Versailles Chapel as an Enduring Image of Divine Kingship,” Edmunds brings together the whole of the individual parts examined earlier and explains the overall significance of the chapel. She points out that the site of the chapel was not venerated so the architects and designers calculatingly invoked Bourbon mythology and its associated architectural monuments to create a sacred space. She discusses how the religious themes that were commonly featured in the chapel (Holy Trinity, God the Father, Holy Spirit, Christ’s Passion, the Virgin Mary, David, Constantine, Charlemagne, St. Louis) were already an integral part of royal propaganda and the mythology of Louis XIV as divine monarch. The viewing audience in the eighteenth century would have understood these connections; we understand them too because Edmunds has carefully and cumulatively constructed her arguments throughout the book: Louis XIV’s chapel celebrates and deifies the institution of the French monarchy past, present, and future; it celebrates Louis XIV’s piety and his role as defender of the faith.

Edmunds has done a remarkable job in organizing an enormous amount of information, in discovering textual and visual sources, and in providing us a case study of a large-scale project under the direction of the Bâtiments. Piety and Politics is a carefully and thoroughly researched monograph on Louis XIV’s chapel at Versailles and is the authoritative work on the chapel.