The Portrait of the King’s Minister and the State of Collaboration

Abstract

The essay examines The Allegorical Portrait of Minister Colbert, engraved by Van Schuppen after Le Brun’s design, in 1664, the year of Colbert’s appointment as the Chief Administrator of Buildings, Arts, and Manufactures in France. It locates the print’s programme within the context of the new administrative system for the arts in France implemented by the Minister and interprets it as an inventive conjuncture of pictorial genres. Either as a frontispiece or as an impresa, Le Brun’s design for the print linked Colbert’s political virtues with the new, collective forms of artistic enterprises. The theme of the collaborative relationship among the arts exemplified by Colbert’s institutional reforms calls attention to the emerging variance between the individual and the institutional in the creation of the national style urged by Colbert’s administration. The print demonstrates how the distillation of collective authorship can be achieved through the remediation of the specific arts — painting and tapestry in this case — based on the unifying role of disegno and the efficiency of print in translating ad vivum the generic characteristics of different media.