Le Vau's Menagerie and the rise of the animalier: Enclosing, dissecting, and representing the animal in early modern France.

Abstract

My dissertation addresses the shifting attitudes towards animals in various intellectual realms--philosophical, literary, and scientific--and how these changing perceptions enrich our understanding of the sudden rise of the animalier and the increased production of animal representations in France during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. I begin my account with a discussion of Louis Le Vau's Menagerie at Versailles (1663) and argue that the octagonal viewing pavilion of this innovative zoo afforded the architectural space for a new type of spectacle. No longer providing visceral enjoyment (animal combat) or exotic entertainment (rare foreign creatures), attitudes stressing the distance between beasts and people, animals came increasingly to be seen as extensions of the human realm during the early modern period. This new way of looking at animals was reflected not only in the works of philosophers, writers, and anatomists, but also in that of the artists of the Academie. My study of the representations of animals includes discussions of the illustrations of Jean de la Fontaine's Fables by Francois Chauveau (1668) and Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1729-34, engraved 1750-59), the anatomical drawings of Claude Perrault (1671), the exotic tapestry series by Francois Desportes (1737-41) and finally various important paintings by Oudry, whose works inspired one salon critic to label him the history painter of animals. By the mid-eighteenth century, therefore, animals as emotional, moral, and physical extensions of men and women could be considered viable subjects for the heretofore exclusively human content of history painting. And in the nineteenth century, the heroic animal in all its dramatic potential emerged in the works of artists such as Eugene Delacroix and Theodore Gericault. My dissertation endeavors to trace this circuitous and multi-faceted path of the animal in thought and representation in early modern France which made it possible.