Antoine Coysevox

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The work of the French sculptor Antoine Coysevox (1640-1720) reflected a shift in official French taste from the relatively severe classicism of the 1660s and 1670s to the more expressive and Italianate baroque style and foreshadowed the rococo.

Antoine Coysevox was born in Lyons on Sept. 29, 1640. He studied at the Royal Academy in Paris (1657-1663). By the late 1670s he was employed at Versailles with many other sculptors engaged in the task of creating fountains and statues for the vast gardens. The artists working on this project were required to conform to the demand by the Royal Academy for a restrained, classical version of the baroque style. Although Coysevox never visited Italy, his personal taste tended to the more fluid, dramatic Italian baroque, and the garden sculpture he executed in the French classical manner is generally dull and uninspired.

During the 1680s the classicism which had dominated the Royal Academy became less constricting, and by the 1690s Louis XIV was himself inclined toward a more specifically Italian baroque style. These developments freed Coysevox's expressive talent, and he gradually began to overshadow François Girardon, his most important rival and the sculptor whose work most clearly reflected the earlier French taste for baroque classicism.

A brilliant example of Coysevox's fully developed personal style is the great stucco relief sculpture (1683-1685) of Louis XIV, which he executed for the Salon de la Guerre (Hall of War) at Versailles. In keeping with the name of this magnificently pompous reception room, Coysevox's relief presents the King on horseback as a conquering emperor riding victoriously over his fallen enemies. The bursting composition, the dramatic use of space, the boldly vigorous high relief, and the lively surface of this work are stylistic characteristics which constitute a break with French classicism.

Coysevox executed over 200 pieces of sculpture, including garden statues, religious works, portrait busts, reliefs, and tombs. His important tomb for Cardinal Mazarin (1689-1693; now in the Louvre, Paris) is surrounded by three richly draped bronze female figures personifying virtues and depicts Mazarin, in marble, kneeling on top of the tomb; the cardinal's gesture is lively and vibrant, and the long train of his vestment flows behind him in dramatic twists and folds and overlaps the edges of the tomb.

Coysevox's later works reveal marked tendencies toward the rococo, the light, delicate, intimate style which was to dominate the arts during the first half of the 18th century. These tendencies are especially to be seen in Coysevox's late portrait busts and in works such as the Duchesse de Bourgogne as Diana (1710) at Versailles. The duchess is shown as a lighthearted goddess of the hunt, her pose animated, her draperies gently agitated by her movement; the composition is pierced with space, and the surface presents a refined contrast of delicate textures. Coysevox died in Paris on Oct. 10, 1720.

Further Reading

The most important works on Coysevox are in French and include Georges Keller-Dorian, Antoine Coysevox (2 vols., 1920), and Luc Benoist, Coysevox (1930). For a brief but thorough and excellent analysis of Coysevox's place in 17th-century French art see Sir Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700 (1953; rev. ed. 1957).

Self-portrait (Louvre)

Louis XIV of France, by Coysevox

Charles Antoine Coysevox (September 29, 1640 - October 10, 1720), French sculptor, was born at Lyon, and belonged to a family which had emigrated from Spain. The name should be pronounced quazevo.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Notes 3 References 4 External links

Biography

He was only seventeen when he produced a statue of the Madonna of considerable merit; and having studied under Louis Lerambert and having further trained himself by taking copies in marble from Roman sculptures (among others from the Venus de Medici and the Castor and Pollux), he was engaged by the bishop of Strasbourg, Cardinal Fürstenberg, to adorn with statuary his château at Saverne (Zabern).

In 1666 he married Marguerite Quillerier, Lerambert's niece, who died a year after the marriage. In 1671, after four years spent on Saverne, which was subsequently destroyed by fire in 1780, he returned to Paris. In 1676 his bust of the painter Charles Le Brun obtained admission for him to the Académie Royale. A year later he married Claude Bourdict.

For niches on the façade of Jules Hardouin-Mansart's royal chapel at Les Invalides he was commissioned to produced a Charlemagne (illustration) as a pendant to Nicolas Coustou's Louis XI. On the upper storey stand his Cardinal Virtues.

In consequence of the coordination of official arts that was exercised by Charles Le Brun between the years 1677 and 1685,^[1] he was employed on behalf of Louis XIV in producing much of the decoration^[2] and a large number of statues for Versailles; and he afterwards worked, between 1701 and 1709, with no less facility and success, for the Château de Marly, subsequently largely abandoned, then destroyed in the Revolution.

Neptune, from Marly, 1699-1705 (Louvre)

Equestrian Fame of Louis XIV, for Marly, 1702, removed to the Tuileries Garden, 1719

He executed Justice and Force and the River Garonne at Versailles. Among his works from Marly are the Mercury and the equestrian Fame (1702) and four groups commissioned for the "river"; La Seine and its pendant at the head of the cascade, La Marne, Neptune and Amphitrite. Models in weather-resistant stucco were set up in 1699, replaced by marbles when they were finished in 1705. The groups were seized as biens nationaux in 1796 and dispersed: the Seine and Marne went to Saint-Cloud and the Neptune and Amphitrite went to Brest in 1801.

In his portrait sculptures the likenesses were said to have been remarkably successful; he produced portrait busts of most of the celebrated men of his age, including Louis XIV and Louis XV at Versailles, Colbert (at Saint-Eustache), Cardinal Mazarin (in the church of the Collège des Quatre-Nations), the Grand Condé (in the Louvre), Maria Theresa of Austria, Turenne, Vauban, Cardinals de Bouillon and de Polignac, the duc de Chaulnes (National Gallery of Art, Washington); Fénelon, Racine, André Le Nôtre (church of St-Roch); Bossuet (in the Louvre), the comte d'Harcourt, William Egon Cardinal Fürstenberg and Charles Le Brun (in the Louvre).

Coysevox died in Paris, 10 October 1720.

Besides the works given above he carved about a dozen funeral monuments, including those to Colbert (at Saint-Eustache), to Cardinal Mazarin (in the Louvre), and to the painter Le Brun (in the church of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardon).

Between 1708 and 1710 Coysevox produced three further sculptures for Marly, a Pan (now in the Louvre), flanked by a Flora and a Dryad (in the Tuileries Gardens). A highly-finished terracotta bozzetto or reduction of the Dryad, signed and dated 1709, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.^[3]

Among the pupils of Coysevox were Nicolas and Guillaume Coustou.

Notes

1. ^ Le Brun's design control over the sculptors carrying out assignments, even apart from the special case of Versailles was analysed in detail in Jennifer Montagu, "Charles Le Brun and His Sculptors: A Reconsideration in the Light of Some Newly Identified Drawings" The Burlington Magazine 118No. 875 (February 1976), pp. 88-95.
2. ^ The "War" Vase of 1684, an improvisation upon the Medici Vase was delivered by Coysevox; its companion, the "Peace" Vase was carved by Jean-Baptiste Tuby.
3. ^ J. Byam Shaw and Ian Robertson, "Sir Karl Parker and the Ashmolean" The Burlington Magazine 104 No. 715 (October 1962), p 429 (illus.), 432.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• L. Benoist, Coysevox (Paris: Series Les Maîtres de l'art) 1930.
• François Souchal; Françoise de La Mourèyre; Henriette Dumuis , French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Reign of Louis XIV, Catalogue A-F (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer) 1977. Contains the latest, revised biography and list of works.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Antoine Coysevox

• Web Gallery of Art
• Art Renewal Center
• Louvre Database (French language)
• Insecula (French language)
• Catholic Encyclopedia article

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