Vie de Charles Le Brun et description détaillée de ses ouvrages (review)

Nivelon's biography of Le Brun was written around 1698. For unknown reasons, it was never published at the time, and though the manuscript was transcribed in the early nineteenth century, it then disappeared, and the transcription was never published either. Pericolo's edition therefore represents the first publication of this important work. Its interest does not lie in its literary qualities — Nivelon was an artist not a writer, and his prose is, in some places, quite hard to follow unaided by Lorenzo Pericolo's annotations; nor does it lie in its objectivity — Nivelon is more hagiographer than biographer, ceaselessly extolling the virtues of his former teacher. Instead its interest lies in the description of lost paintings, such as Le Sacrifice d'Iphigénie, and in the emphasis placed on expression in these descriptions, a key term in Le Brun's aesthetic. Nivelon's descriptions focus on the way in which the faces and bodies of Le Brun's figures express their joy, pain and anger. In his Sacrifice d'Iphigénie, Le Brun did not follow the ancient tradition of a veiled Agamemnon; instead he took the opportunity to depict Agamemnon's emotional state, showing him trying to hide his grief by veiling his face, and yet so overcome by his emotion that he is unable to do so. The central importance of expression in Nivelon's biography is confirmed by his inclusion of Le Brun's famous Traité des passions, the speech he delivered to the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1668, which sets out how each passion affects the face and the body, and thus offers the painter a manual for making emotional states visible. According to Nivelon, when the King saw Le Brun's La Résolution prise de faire la guerre aux Hollandais, he said to him: 'M. Le Brun, vous m'avez fait voir des choses que j'ai ressenties'. Whether we believe Nivelon's anecdote or not, Pericolo's edition with its useful introduction, makes essential reading for art historians.