Resumen de Le "Cabinet des Beaux-arts" de Charles Perrault: le monument d'un moderne
The Fine Arts Cabinet of Charles Perrault: monument of a modern man.
The Fine Arts Cabinet of Charles Perrault counts as one of the outstanding initiatives in the art of 17th century decoration in France. Historical perspective is difficult because of the scarcity of the material and textual vestiges identified up to the present that could shed light on Perrault's realization. Since Antoine Schnapper's fundamental article (1968), there is consensus for the conclusion: that executed between 1680 and 1683, the cabinet would be one of the last artistic initiatives of the "controleur general des Bâtiments", influential member of the "Petite Académie" and privileged intermediary of the "Académie Royal de Peinture et Sculpture", before he fell into the disgrace, which drove him away from the king's administration when Colbert died. Several works and documents that have been exhumed, as well as the detail of certain allegories of the decoration, authorize the dating of the final design and the execution of Perrault's commission between 1686 and 1690. We thus propose the re-reading of this decoration and its engravings as a parallel "gesture" to the controversial declamation by the same Perrault, of the poem "Le Siècle de Louis le Grand", in 1687, at the "Académie Française". The openly political contents of the allegories of the cabinet seem less to concretate royal authority than to be the stance of a Modern, who, rejected by the "bâtiments", sought to justify the cultural policies that he embodied during almost twenty years.
