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Lot Essay
In November 1730, Languet de Gergy, the priest of the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, commissioned Franois Lemoyne, the most accomplished history painter of his generation, to decorate the 45-foot wide ceiling vault of the nearly completed Chapel of the Holy Virgin. Lemoyne chose to represent the Assumption of the Virgin, and with the assistance of his apprentice Donat Nonnotte, began his ceiling fresco in July 1731, completing the project in October 1732. He already had experience with ceiling decoration, having completed a Transfiguration for the Chapel of Saint-Louis in the Church of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin in 1724; however, his experiment with true fresco in the Italian manner in the Saint-Sulpice commission proved less than entirely successful and the completed ceiling suffered from condition problems which were worsened by a fire in 1762 that cracked the plaster and obliterated nearly a dozen figures. Repeatedly altered, repaired and repainted over the next century and a half, the ceiling is today a shadow of Lemoyne's original creation.
However, the graceful rhythmicality of complex figural groupings and the bright, innovative color scheme which contemporaries had so admired in the ceiling can be appreciated in the artist's brilliant modello, which has come down to us in a superb state of preservation. In addition to seventeen extant figure studies in the Louvre, and one recorded, but now lost, compositional drawing, three oil sketches connected to the project are known today. One, a ricordo kept in the prebytery of Saint-Sulpice, was at one time thought to be by Natoire, but has been attributed by Jean-Luc Bordeaux more convincingly to Nonnotte who, of course, had actually assisted Lemoyne in the execution of the ceiling; whoever its author, it is certainly not from Lemoyne's own hand. Another sketch, now in the Louvre, is of nearly identical dimensions, which makes for complications in disentangling its history from that of the present sketch. One of Lemoyne's two oil sketches was still with him at the time of his death; one was exhibited by the dealer Le Brun in the 1783 Salon de la Correspondance, but which -- the present painting or the Louvre sketch -- is impossible to determine. However, Bordeaux has observed that the present modello 'shows more spontaneity in the execution' than the Louvre version, and it is reasonable to suppose that it precedes the Louvre model which formalizes, somewhat more dryly, the final composition.
Lemoyne's composition depicts the final episode in the Death of the Virgin, now an article of Catholic faith, whose origin lay in apocryphal literature: the taking up to heaven of the body and soul of the Virgin Mary three days after her death. The Virgin in rapture is seen rising through the center of Lemoyne's oval, surrounded by angels, while saints -- including the church's patrons, Sulpice and Peter -- apostles and martyrs gather on the ground below and watch her ascension with awe.
The Assumption of the Virgin confirmed as fact the promise first proffered in the Saint-Thomas d'Aquin Transfiguration: it was now obvious that Lemoyne was without rival as a painter of illusionistic decoration in the Grand Manner. No French painter since Charles Lebrun had attempted to work on such a scale, and his masterpiece, the vast ceiling of The Apotheosis of Hercules at Versailles (1732-36), was soon to reveal Lemoyne's full skills and ambition as a decorator, which would only be surpassed several decades later by the genius of Tiepolo.
However, the graceful rhythmicality of complex figural groupings and the bright, innovative color scheme which contemporaries had so admired in the ceiling can be appreciated in the artist's brilliant modello, which has come down to us in a superb state of preservation. In addition to seventeen extant figure studies in the Louvre, and one recorded, but now lost, compositional drawing, three oil sketches connected to the project are known today. One, a ricordo kept in the prebytery of Saint-Sulpice, was at one time thought to be by Natoire, but has been attributed by Jean-Luc Bordeaux more convincingly to Nonnotte who, of course, had actually assisted Lemoyne in the execution of the ceiling; whoever its author, it is certainly not from Lemoyne's own hand. Another sketch, now in the Louvre, is of nearly identical dimensions, which makes for complications in disentangling its history from that of the present sketch. One of Lemoyne's two oil sketches was still with him at the time of his death; one was exhibited by the dealer Le Brun in the 1783 Salon de la Correspondance, but which -- the present painting or the Louvre sketch -- is impossible to determine. However, Bordeaux has observed that the present modello 'shows more spontaneity in the execution' than the Louvre version, and it is reasonable to suppose that it precedes the Louvre model which formalizes, somewhat more dryly, the final composition.
Lemoyne's composition depicts the final episode in the Death of the Virgin, now an article of Catholic faith, whose origin lay in apocryphal literature: the taking up to heaven of the body and soul of the Virgin Mary three days after her death. The Virgin in rapture is seen rising through the center of Lemoyne's oval, surrounded by angels, while saints -- including the church's patrons, Sulpice and Peter -- apostles and martyrs gather on the ground below and watch her ascension with awe.
The Assumption of the Virgin confirmed as fact the promise first proffered in the Saint-Thomas d'Aquin Transfiguration: it was now obvious that Lemoyne was without rival as a painter of illusionistic decoration in the Grand Manner. No French painter since Charles Lebrun had attempted to work on such a scale, and his masterpiece, the vast ceiling of The Apotheosis of Hercules at Versailles (1732-36), was soon to reveal Lemoyne's full skills and ambition as a decorator, which would only be surpassed several decades later by the genius of Tiepolo.