"Of the greatest extent": The Matter of Size in Louis XIV's Savonnerie Carpets

In 1662, Louis XIV's minister of the marine, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, wrote his intendant in Toulon with a top-secret request. He asked him to procure a sizable supply of carpets from Marseilles-based merchants with commercial ties to the Levant, specifying that the carpets be of the largest possible dimensions: six to eight aunes (7.14–9.52 meters) wide and, in length, "de la plus grande estendüe."¹ After divulging that they would be destined for galleries in the Louvre, he admonished the provincial administrator to keep the commission in the strictest confidence. His intendant never fulfilled the order, but in the years that followed Colbert would find a domestic source for his gigantic "tapis à la turquie" (Turkish-style hand-knotted pile carpets), and the French version of these textiles was given the designation "Savonnerie" after the former soap factory where most of them were produced. By 1668, the royally ordained rival workshops of the Dupont and Lourdet families had begun weaving the ninety-three carpets for the Louvre's Galerie du bord de l'eau, also known as the Grande Galerie. The manufacturers took twenty years to complete their monumental task, a duration of time commensurate with the carpets' considerable volume.² Lined up to fill the enormous gallery, the coverings would have measured a staggering 440 meters in length, with a surface area of over 3,700 square meters.

Formally, the carpets were devised to project uniformity at an imposing scale: they boast regular proportions and an even surface facture, and they share a deep black ground filled with flowers and scrolling acanthus leaves, all bound by identical gadrooned borders (fig. 1). Each carpet has a tripartite composition, its center bursting with symbols of royal splendor and flanked on either side by a cartouche. The latter alternate throughout the series between allegorical figures imitating camaïeu bas-reliefs and picturesque landscapes in warm hues, such that the carpets shift between allusions to the sovereign's attributes and the peaceful territory he ruled, oscillating between abstract and representational registers.³ Colbert's initial request for the carpets, however, mentions nothing of this ornamental scheme and only stipulates their dimensions. Such a purely quantitative manner of describing the textiles is repeated in the account books of the Dupont atelier, wherein carpets are recorded not by a descriptive drawing but rather as scaled-down grids in red chalk (fig. 2). This system of notation resulted, no doubt, from the fact that workshops were paid by the square aune and their artisans by the "dizaine," or ten-knot row.⁴ Subtending the carpets' overarching visual unity was a finer-grained structure of repetition, that of individual ghiordes knots affixed to a matrix of warp and weft, like so many pixels of color in dyed wool. By considering the carpets' reticulated surfaces alongside the administration's persistent preoccupation with their measurement, the very magnitude at which these discrete knots were assembled emerges as the carpets' most audacious feature. Surprisingly, the collective size of the Savonnerie carpets woven for the Grande Galerie has never been the object of critical attention.

In the seventeenth century, the word "estendüe" denoted both physical and figurative extent, and this essay takes this double definition as its basis for grounding a visual analysis of the Savonnerie carpets in an understanding of their manufacture.⁵ Insisting upon their scale—the carpets' sheer occupation of space—as a significant factor in their political connotation requires one to understand how their size would have been perceived as exceptional to begin with.⁶ At the same time, as one begins to examine the carpets in all aspects of their creation—diving into what Gottfried Semper referred to as Kunstwerden, the "becoming of the work of art"—fissures emerge that complicate triumphal accounts of the textiles' invention and reception.⁷ From the sourcing of exceptional tree specimens for new looms to the conscription of hundreds of orphans for the textiles' fabrication, the manner in which the carpets' size was achieved becomes impossible to disentangle from their projected significance. Upon...