The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France

Abstract

Art historian Meredith Martin and historian Gilliam Weiss teamed up to combine their analytical skills to study and scrutinize a visual legacy of the ancien régime that remains understudied although—so they rightly claim and clearly explain—has been ‘hiding in plain sight.’ Often observed in iconographic schemes in Paris, Versailles and beyond, the depiction of convicts (forçats) and enslaved Turks (esclaves turcs) has not hitherto been the focus of an extensive study, and nobody is better positioned than Martin and Weiss to right this wrong. Their analysis draws attention to the importance of the French crown’s enormous efforts to achieve maritime domination in the Mediterranean and focuses on the enslaved labour and artistic representations of Turcs and Maures who, as subordinates of the French king, symbolized his mastery of the sea and the Catholic church’s dominance over Islam opponents of the Ottoman Empire. The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and the Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France is a formidable and long-needed study of the extensive and politically charge pictorial schemes that proliferated the wide-reaching powers of Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France and symbolizes, to sensitized twenty-first-century eyes and minds, the atrocities and violent domination of a ruler whose visual propaganda suggested physical and diplomatic strength in embellished—even elegant—artistic masterpieces. Composed in four chapters, this informative publication analyses an array of painted and sculpted depictions of the victor and his subjects by explaining the historical facts of Louis’ Mediterranean might and the religious discrimination and slavery it was based upon.