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| Charles Le Brun The Crucifixion with Angels ca. 1656 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
"After the disgrace of Monsieur Fouquet, Monsieur Le Brun had the privilege of working for her serene Majesty the Queen Mother. This august and devout Princess having one evening given her mind to a devout meditation, there came to her the idea of Christ raised on the cross with the angels coming to adore him, and, she having given an account of this and Monsieur Le Brun happening to be present, he secretly set to work on this idea and painted the picture called The Crucifixion with Angels. When he had finished it, he came to present it to the Queen; she, satisfied to see her ideal so well expressed, gave her portrait to Monsieur Le Brun in a box of diamonds and was so kind as to attach it herself to a chain that he was wearing."
– Guillet de Saint Georges (historiographer of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture from 1682 to 1705)
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| Charles Le Brun The Family of Darius before Alexander 1660 oil on canvas Château de Versailles |
"That same year of 1660, the King, being at Fontainebleau, commissioned Monsieur Le Brun to work on a subject taken from the story of Alexander, and His Majesty was willing to take the pleasure of devoting some moments of his leisure hours to seeing it painted: therefore, His Majesty arranged for him to lodge in the castle close to his own apartments and came to see him at unexpected moments, when he stood brush in hand, and His Majesty even deigned to converse with him about the greatest actions of this hero; there Monsieur Le Brun painted the picture of the family of Darius, representing Alexander who, emerging victorious from the battle of Issus, came to pay a visit to the princesses of the Royal house of Persia who had been made captive by this victory. . . . The picture of the family of Darius laid the foundations for Monsieur Le Brun's fortune with the king. His Majesty gave him a portrait enriched with diamonds of considerable price. He made him his Premier Painter and awarded him the pension of twelve thousand livres attaching to this post. He ennobled him and was so kind as to buckle on his sword of nobility with his own hands."
– Guillet de Saint Georges (historiographer of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture from 1682 to 1705)
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| Nicolas Poussin The Israelites gathering the Manna in the Desert ca. 1637-39 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Nicolas Poussin The Ordination (from Poussin's second series of Sacraments) 1647 oil on canvas National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh |
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| Nicolas Poussin Eliezer and Rebecca ca. 1660-61 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
"The essence of history painting or sculpture was to know how to express a subject. From the outset, academicians dwelt on expression, both general and particular. Their intention was to demonstrate that painting was not silent but could be as eloquent as poetry. It seems that the French public was unaccustomed to interpreting painting, as is evident from Nicolas Poussin's letters. For example, he was afraid that his patron Paul Fréart de Chantelou would be unable to see what he had sought to represent in The Israelites gathering the Manna in the Desert and gave him explanations, advising him to read the story and the picture "in order to perceive whether everything is appropriate for the subject" and asking Jean Le Maire to point out its beauties. In relation to The Ordination, Poussin accused Chantelou of having been "hasty in the judgment that you have reached about my works. In this art, it is very difficult to judge correctly if one does not possess considerable amounts of theory and practice combined." During the debate on Poussin's Eliezer and Rebecca after Philippe de Champaigne's lecture of January 1668, Le Brun reminded his audience of the difficulty of conveying a subject, adding that "whatever character the painter uses to explain the subject of his picture, there will always be crude or malicious interpreters who will attempt to alter or obscure the truth of anything, and the painter who sought both to satisfy the ignorant and pre-empt the malicious would ultimately be obliged to write into his picture the names of the objects that he had represented."
"It seems that in seventeenth-century France, most spectators needed a written explanation, as evidenced by Félibien's rhetoric in his earliest descriptions of pictures. These texts were addressed to Louis XIV and were intended to explicate the beauties of Le Brun's painting The Queen of Persia at the Feet of Alexander [also called The Family of Darius before Alexander, above]. Félibien implies that the king would be incapable of perceiving these if left to his own devices: "But the extent of Your Majesty's occupation with the business of state leaves you no time to consider the care that painting takes to make itself agreeable to your eyes, or, rather, Your Majesty accomplishes so many and such great things simultaneously, that he has no time to think about everything that he does." The king could not be expected to appreciate painting without explanation. Consequently, ways had to be found to make history painting more communicative, which might perhaps require the intermediary of men of letters. This was the role of expression, a very different notion from that of affetti in Italian art theory."
"In Le Brun's words of 1668: "Expression is a naive and natural resemblance to the things that one wishes to represent: it is necessary and affects every department of painting. A picture cannot be perfect without expression, which makes clear the true character of everything. Through it, we perceive the nature of bodies, the way that the figures seem to be in movement; through it, everything feigned seems to be true. It presides in color as in drawing; it must enter into the representation of landscapes and the grouping of figures."
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"The need to make paintings speak – that is, to elicit in the spectator feelings comparable to those that he might experience in reading a book or attending a play – resulted in the appearance in the academic context of what seems today the most obvious of attributes: titles. In this case as in many others, the first argument for providing a title came from the abbé Du Bos: "I have oftentimes wondered why painters, who have so great an interest in making those personages known, by whose figures they intend to move us, and who find it so vastly difficult to distinguish them sufficiently by the sole aid of the pencil, why, I say, they do not accompany always their historical pieces with a short inscription. The greatest part of the spectators, who are in other respects capable of doing justice to the work, are not learned enough to guess at the subject of the picture."
– texts and quoted passages from The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture: The Birth of the French School, 1648-1793 by Christian Michel, published in France in 2012, translated by Chris Miller and published by Getty Research Institute in 2018