Louis XIV’s “The City of the Sun”

Abstract

The Versailles Park is a synthesis of the utopian fantasies of Tommaso Campanella and the urban baroque transformations of Rome, expressed through landscape architecture. Imbued with Campanella’s “mystical imperialism,” Louis XIV relegates the care of the palace to the background, building first and foremost a man-made landscape as a metaphor for the representation of absolute power. If the Baroque transformations of Rome are projections of private manorial spatial structures onto the layout of the city, the Park of Versailles is the opposite phase of this process initiated by the Roman pontiffs, that is, the projection of Roman Baroque urban structures onto the only truly private property in France at the time. The layouts of Versailles are an essence of Baroque, which could not be obtained either in Rome itself or in Paris with their dense buildings. Louis XIV contrasts Versailles with the capital of the Catholic world and the restless capital of his own kingdom. The park is saturated with didactic symbolism, expressing his concern for the education of worthy successors. The king himself draws up guidebooks and orders the publication of plans of Versailles in which the south is at the top, so that no one dares to look at his residence from the side of the sun he has appropriated. The appearance and semantics of the bosquets and fountains allegorically represent the spheres of interest without which power can be neither enlightened nor universal. However, the grandiose planning structures are only the skeleton; the flesh of the Versailles Park is the walls of trembling foliage, the marble and gilding of statues and decorations, the sparkling and hissing of fountain jets, bursts of sunlight in shadow, the contrasts of cosmic and obscure spaces that are playfully comfortable. The Park of Versailles is a center of sensual pleasures, reaching the peak of ingenuity in the extravagant day-and-night revelries. Through a sophisticated and unconventional stage direction, earth, air, fire and water — all four elements — stir the imagination, memory and thought in the Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk, which glorifies the Sun King.