France: “The making of Holy Images” at the Louvre Museum
The Louvre Museum in Paris is showing two parallel expositions until June 29, 2015, respectively entitled “Poussin et Dieu” (Poussin and God) and “La fabrique des saintes images” (The making of Holy Images). For the 350th anniversary of the death of Nicolas Poussin (1665 ; on the picture : The flight into Egypt, 1657), the Louvre is highlighting the originality of the painter of the Gospels’ sacred paintings.
As an echo, a second exposition situated in the same part of the museum explains the process of the elaboration and creation of sacred images in Poussin’s times and in the places where he lived: in Rome and Paris, in a century marked by the religious quarrel born of the Protestant Reformation and at a time of spiritual renewal. In answer to the Protestant thinkers’ attack on religious iconography, religious art in Italy was based on a devout search for purity and truth. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) reaffirmed the possibility, legitimacy and usefulness of the sacred images profoundly and brutally attacked by the reformers. This was the dawn of an unexpected renaissance, prelude to an incomparable flowering of which the exposition shows two aspects: the triumphant iconophilia of pontifical Rome and the French School’s minor expression of it.
Regrouping 85 works (sketches, engravings, paintings, art objects and sculptures), La fabrique des saintes images evokes the rebirth of religious art through the greatest painters, sculptors and architects of the 17th century: Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona in Rome; Simon Vouet, Eustache Le Sueur, Philippe de Champaigne and the Le Nain brothers in Paris. The exposition is divided into four thematic sections: “Images not made by the hand of man”, “The glory of the images. Rome 1580-1660”, The French School. Paris, 1627-1660”, “The Blessed Sacrament”.
Beginning with the presentation of one of the Catholic Church’s major arguments to justify the existence and legitimacy of the images (if Jesus left men images of His face and His body, then God must approve of images), the texts then touch upon two different and complementary realities: triumphant pontifical Rome at the great jubilees of 1600, 165 and 1650; and Paris, the mirror of a France deeply torn by the religious wars and whose Church defended a certain independence from the papacy (the Gallican Church of France remained opposed to the ultramontane influence that defended the spiritual and jurisdictional primacy of the pope over the political power). The exposition ends with a section consecrated to the Blessed Sacrament, whose cult took on a new dimension in the 17th century: the Catholic Church sees in the Eucharist not only the memorial of the Passion and the ultimate sacrament of thanksgiving, but also the permanent renewal of Jesus’ sacrifice and the real presence of Christ under the form of the sacred species. The exaltation of the Blessed Sacrament was one of the characteristics of the Catholic Reformation and its iconography.
Until June 29, 2015. Louvre Museum – 99 rue de Rivoli 75001 Paris – Hall Napoléon, under the pyramid. Special ticket to the Hall Napoléon expositions: 13€. Double ticket (permanent collections and exposition): 16€. Open every day, except Tuesday, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Night openings Wednesday and Friday until 9:45 p.m. Metro Palais-Royal – Louvre Musée du Louvre.
(Source: louvre – DICI no.315 May dated 15, 2015)
