0174ApolloSunGod_LeBrun1

0174ApolloSunGod_LeBrun1

ChateauVersailles.fr website
Ovid Met.1.750-2.400

Charles Lebrun, "Apollo Takes his Leave of Tethys," study for ceiling painting executed at Hôtel Jérôme de Nouveau, Paris, 1650-51; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, cat. 4197.

Apollo surges into the new day from the presence of Tethys, wife of Oceanus.

Lebrun, who would in the next decade organize the Louis/Apollo connection at Versailles is here responsible for the same iconographic association, but to a different individual.

National Gallery of Ireland, Le Classicisme Français: masterpieces of seventeenth century painting (Dublin, 1985): 35-38. (click)

Allegory of Abundance with a central male figure, goddesses, a sleeping woman, and a dark figure.

Louis XIV: "Never has anyone ... so clearly established the striking parallel between king and sun." (Girard p. 189) And Lebrun is responsible for the application of the myth at Versailles. Yet, antedates Louis' usage by a decade.

BUT: "Such a subject was appropriate, not to the glorification of Louis XIV, who was not yet the Sun King in 1650, but to the charge of Jérôme de Nouveau, 'Surintendant des Postes et Relais.' ... This important personage was, on the contrary, connected to the party of the Fronde and to Fouquet, and thought poorly of by Colbert and Mazzarin, whose correspondence he instructed to be opened." (Nat.Gal., Dublin, p. 38)s

Note connection to Michel Corneille the Younger's "Apollo and Tethys and Cybele"

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.