Vesper No. 8 | Vesper | Spring-Summer 2023
Fabio
Gigone
The Balustrade of Louis XIV’s Chambre
du Roi: the Architecture of the Ban
Keywords
Louis XIV,
Versailles, Balustrade, Ban, Sovereignty
The paper
examines the French monarch’s double nature in the 17th century in
relation to the evolution of the sovereign’s architectural expressions.
Born from
the superimposition of theological and political aspects, the double nature of
the French king manifested in iconographic formulas, legal apparatuses, linguistic
mechanisms, and architectural devices.
Among the
latter, Louis XIV’s Chambre du Roi in Versailles and its gilded
balustraded represented the threshold between the natural and the mystical
bodies.
The paper
detects the activation of the ban – embedded in Louis XIV’s
balustrade – as a juridical and political device that governs and
manifests the French king’s sovereign power, and it reveals its doubling.
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