Abstract
The King of France as Collector in the Seventeenth Century The Renaissance worked actively and effectively to make the arts and patronage of the arts essential to the magnificence of princes. Having recovered numerous ancient texts, from Aristotle to Pliny, which established the necessity of this linkage, humanists suggested that the grandeur of a king, although established by war, was maintained by peace. The fruits of peace, they claimed, were commercial prosperity and progress in the arts, which in turn immortalized the prince's glory. A vast body of encomiastic literature, spanning many countries and centuries, celebrated the actions of princes on behalf of the arts in the hope of encouraging them even further. Unfortunately, this support was not always and everywhere forthcoming: Pevsner's classic study of academies of art gives considerable evidence of artists who sought a patronage that many princes failed to grant. In France, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture escaped penury only when, after fifteen years of difficulty and entreaty, Jean Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, offered to protect it.1
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