The King’s Two Teeth

Hyacinthe Rigaud’s famous swagger portrait of Louis XIV in full regalia presents ‘Louis the Great’ at the height of his powers, framed in an ostentatiously theatrical setting. Painted in 1701, displayed at the Paris Salon in 1704, the work dazzles the viewer with sumptuous ceremonial display.¹ Crown, sceptre, great sword of state, and heavy, fleur-de-lisée ermine robes evoke the putatively timeless nature of the French monarchy. The king’s posture is unfazed, relaxed, mildly disdainful. He inverts the royal sceptre playfully as though it were a walking stick, or a child’s toy – or the swagger-stick of a military commander; the gesture magnifies rather than diminishes his grandeur. Strongly featured are his sculpted legs, which the chronicler, the duc de Saint-Simon, a far from sycophantic aficionado of court life, adjudged the finest he ever saw. They painstakingly replicate the pose which Louis, as a young man, had adopted when dancing as Apollo in court ballets as his own Premier Dancer, at a time when the Sun King was in the ascendant.² The king’s lofty and impassive gaze, almost dictating reverential obeisance from the humble spectator, emerges from a body polished, primped and more than a little prettified for the occasion. The calfmuscles are scarcely those of a sextuagenarian: especially one often crippled by gout and habituated to being pushed round in a wheelchair. The redheeled courtier shoes lift the ruler well above his scarcely impressive five foot three inches. The copious curls of a towering black wig obscure the fact that Louis was precociously bald. And the unruffled forehead displays a ruler with scarcely a care in the world – even though when it was painted Louis was embarking with heavy heart on what would be his last, ruinous war, the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14). Yet in this mythologizing and mendacious portrait which seeks to erase the passage, even the existence, of time, one feature stands out – and shocks – for its stark naturalism: hollow cheeks and wrinkled mouth reveal a ruler with not a tooth in his head.

It is difficult to say quite what Rigaud was intending by portraying the royal mouth in this hyper-realistic manner – a rather extraordinary gesture in fact in a period in which toothlessness had rarity value in paintings depicting men and women of power. ‘Warts and all’ was unusual and emphatically not the Louis-Quatorzian way. Over Louis XIV’s long reign (1643–1715), moreover, portraits of the king increasingly presented the royal body in glorificatory, mythologizing ways which made light of transient corporeal features. The king was thus painted consorting with pagan gods and goddesses, for example, or else hovering symbolically over battlefields and sieges more like a tutelary deity than a commander stripped for battle.³ At times, this representational symbolism seemed on the point of erasing the doctrine of ‘the king’s two bodies’ which, as Ernst Kantorowitz has shown, was at the heart of the ritual logic of French monarchy from the Middle Ages onwards.⁴ According to this doctrine, the king possessed both a body that was eternal and ceremonial and one that was also biological and transitory. Kings might die but kingship never did. Rigaud’s portrait overtly subscribes to the mythologizing aesthetic whereby Louis the Great rises above human affairs and defies the passage of time, and at first sight it may appear that the painter is showing the king’s ceremonial body transcending and annulling the monarch’s biological frame. Yet the toothless mouth is a kind of covert reminder of and homage to the doctrine of the ‘king’s two bodies’. Although it would be utterly unseemly – for reasons which we will explore – for Rigaud to have shown the king’s mouth open revealing his toothlessness for all to see, the artist nevertheless contrives to caution viewers to be wary of the painting’s overt overblown claims. Kings (even Louis XIV) were men not gods, and aged accordingly.

In this paper, I have accepted what I take to be Rigaud’s invitation to recall the biological body of the king. While remaining heedful...