Excerpt..
French Decorative Arts During the Reign of Louis XIV: 1654–1715
In 1663, Louis XIV’s future superintendent of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), wrote that the time of private patrons was over: the hour had come for them to yield to the king. To him, and him alone, now belonged the task of steering the intellectual and artistic life of the kingdom. Colbert’s vision for the young Louis XIV (1638–1715), to whom he was to dedicate all his gifts as financial adviser and administrator, strikingly prefigures the development of the arts in France during the long reign of the Sun King , when all the arts would revolve around the king’s personal tastes and will and would reflect the power and splendor of the sovereign and the state. Yet, the prophetic accuracy of Colbert’s statement notwithstanding, no declaration of artistic policy can truly account for the variety, the fantasy, and the brilliant accomplishments of the arts fostered by Louis XIV from 1661, the year he decided to rule France alone (without a prime minister, assisted only by a three-man Privy Council) until his death in 1715.
In 1661, both the taste of the young monarch and prevailing artistic style had already been shaped by the creative fervor of the 1650s. When Louis was anointed king at Reims in 1654, the then-predominant fashion in Paris was the Italian Baroque, so enthusiastically promoted by Cardinal Mazarin (1601–1661), prime minister and godfather to Louis. Italian painters such as Gian Francesco Romanelli were imported by Mazarin to decorate his palace and were recruited to work on the Palais du Louvre. The Royal Apartments and those of the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria, were redecorated in 1654–55 with frescoed and stuccoed ceilings in the Bolognese manner. Romanelli worked side by side with French sculptors—sometimes trained in Italy , like Michel Anguier—in a newfound harmony that recalled the Renaissance traditions of the Fontainebleau of François I (1494–1547) and brought together Italian decorative inventions and French elegance of line and composition.
Full article at Metropolitan Museum of Art