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Lot Essay
'La Force' is one of six overdoors -- four depicting allegories of the cardinal virtues, the other two of Muses -- commissioned from Nattier in 1734 by Jean-Philippe, Chevalier d'Orléans (1702-1748), Grand Prior of the Order of Malta in Paris. They were ordered as part of a larger project to embellish the renovated and enlarged interior of the Palais du Temple. The painter Jean Raoux (1677-1734) was the principal artist engaged to contribute to the decorative scheme, and he produced a series of female personifications of the Arts and Sciences, three of which are known to have survived (in Rouen and Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin). Upon Raoux's death in 1734, Jean-Philippe d'Orléans turned to Nattier to complete the ever-expanding project. It would prove to be one of the artist's greatest commissions.
The first of Nattier's completed paintings, Justice Chastising Injustice (private collection, New York) was installed in the elaborately carved boiserie paneling of the Salon du Temple at the beginning of 1737; it was briefly removed that summer when it was sent for exhibition to the annual Salon. The second composition, Prudence (present whereabouts unknown), was completed two years later and shown at the Salon of 1740. The third painting, 'La Force' (Fortitude) was executed in 1743 and exhibited in 1745. The last of the commissioned virtues -- Temperance -- has gone without trace, and cannot today be identified, nor can the two Muses that Nattier was asked to contribute.
The medieval canon of Christian virtues included the three Theological Virtues -- faith, hope and charity -- that were enumerated in the Bible (I Corinthians 13:13), as well as the four Cardinal Virtues -- justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude. First formulated by Plato in The Republic (4:427) as the virtues required of citizens of the ideal city-state, the Cardinal Virtues were later sanctioned for Christians by the fathers of the Church, as benefits to be derived by man from the Eucharist. Nattier's interpretations of the Virtues follow closely the ideograms set forth by the Rennaissance scholar Cesare Ripa; as Xavier Salmon has noted, a 1645 edition of Ripa's Iconologia was catalogued in Nattier's library. For example, the sword of Justice, the column and the lion are the traditional symbols of Fortitude that found visual form in Ripa and were adopted by Nattier for 'La Force'.
Although their iconography is conventional, Nattier's Virtues are strikingly novel in their conception. The most sought-after court portraitist of his day, Nattier brought his gifts for flattery and elegance to these allegories. Though he set out to complement the glistening paint handling found in the paintings that Raoux had already produced for the Temple, from the first he made his figures more fully fleshed and convincing, less doll-like than the older artist, and he carefully attended to the textures and patterns of silk, satin, metalwork and fur. The subject of 'La Force' makes so vivid an impression that, since the time of the Goncourt brothers (1879) at least, she has been presumed to depict Marie-Anne de Mailly-Nesle (1717-1744), the daughter of Louis III, Marquis de Nesle and Armande-Felice de la Porte-Mazarin. Marie-Anne married the Marquis de La Tournelle, but after his death in 1742 she became the official mistress of Louis XV, succeeding two of her sisters, the Comtesse de Mailly and the Marquise de Vintimille. Created Duchesse de Châteauroux in 1743, she died, perhaps of poisoning, the following year.
Certainly Nattier worked from a living model, and the fact that Marie-Anne was elevated to the rank of Duchesse in the year 'La Force' was painted tempts us to see her beautiful features in the face of Nattier's emblem of Fortitude. She is, in fact, identified as the model for the picture in a much later engraving by Noël Pruneau, in which she is shown bust-length and without attributes. Nevertheless, when, on 10 January 1750, Nattier presented to the Académie Royale trial proofs of the commissioned engraving of 'La Force' by Jean-Joseph Balechou (1716-1764), the painting was designated simply as 'la figure d'une femme, l'emblem de la Force'. Indeed, not a single known 18th-century source assigns the name of any sitter to any of Nattier's Virtues.
After Jean-Philippe d'Orléans' sudden death in 1748, Nattier reclaimed his paintings, for which he had received only partial payment. When they appeared in 1763 in Nattier's sale, three years before the artist's death, they were listed together in a single lot as 'sept dessus de porte scavoir: Quatre Vertus...'. The paintings remained together until the dispersal of the Flury-Hérard collection in 1872.
All of Nattier's paintings for the Temple were irregularly shaped for encadrements chantournés, probably to fit into rococo wall paneling. Of the three Virtues by Nattier known today, each was altered at some point after 1872 and regularized in format: both Justice and Prudence were enlarged and had their scalloped upper corners and curved bottoms filled in; 'La Force' was cut on both sides by several inches to make it upright rectanglar in format. The original dimensions of 'La Force' were 127 x 140 cm., and its original shape can be seen in Balechou's engraving (fig.1), where one can see more clearly Fortitude's lost lion.
An untraced drawing entitled 'La Force', which was perhaps a study for the Portanova picture, appeared as lot 4 in the Nattier sale of 1763. Numerous copies of the painting, which Xavier Salmon describes as 'probably the most celebrated' of the group, are recorded.
We are grateful to Joseph Baillio for his assistance in cataloguing this lot which is to be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of paintings by Jean-Marc Nattier being prepared by him with the assistance of the Wildenstein Institute.
The first of Nattier's completed paintings, Justice Chastising Injustice (private collection, New York) was installed in the elaborately carved boiserie paneling of the Salon du Temple at the beginning of 1737; it was briefly removed that summer when it was sent for exhibition to the annual Salon. The second composition, Prudence (present whereabouts unknown), was completed two years later and shown at the Salon of 1740. The third painting, 'La Force' (Fortitude) was executed in 1743 and exhibited in 1745. The last of the commissioned virtues -- Temperance -- has gone without trace, and cannot today be identified, nor can the two Muses that Nattier was asked to contribute.
The medieval canon of Christian virtues included the three Theological Virtues -- faith, hope and charity -- that were enumerated in the Bible (I Corinthians 13:13), as well as the four Cardinal Virtues -- justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude. First formulated by Plato in The Republic (4:427) as the virtues required of citizens of the ideal city-state, the Cardinal Virtues were later sanctioned for Christians by the fathers of the Church, as benefits to be derived by man from the Eucharist. Nattier's interpretations of the Virtues follow closely the ideograms set forth by the Rennaissance scholar Cesare Ripa; as Xavier Salmon has noted, a 1645 edition of Ripa's Iconologia was catalogued in Nattier's library. For example, the sword of Justice, the column and the lion are the traditional symbols of Fortitude that found visual form in Ripa and were adopted by Nattier for 'La Force'.
Although their iconography is conventional, Nattier's Virtues are strikingly novel in their conception. The most sought-after court portraitist of his day, Nattier brought his gifts for flattery and elegance to these allegories. Though he set out to complement the glistening paint handling found in the paintings that Raoux had already produced for the Temple, from the first he made his figures more fully fleshed and convincing, less doll-like than the older artist, and he carefully attended to the textures and patterns of silk, satin, metalwork and fur. The subject of 'La Force' makes so vivid an impression that, since the time of the Goncourt brothers (1879) at least, she has been presumed to depict Marie-Anne de Mailly-Nesle (1717-1744), the daughter of Louis III, Marquis de Nesle and Armande-Felice de la Porte-Mazarin. Marie-Anne married the Marquis de La Tournelle, but after his death in 1742 she became the official mistress of Louis XV, succeeding two of her sisters, the Comtesse de Mailly and the Marquise de Vintimille. Created Duchesse de Châteauroux in 1743, she died, perhaps of poisoning, the following year.
Certainly Nattier worked from a living model, and the fact that Marie-Anne was elevated to the rank of Duchesse in the year 'La Force' was painted tempts us to see her beautiful features in the face of Nattier's emblem of Fortitude. She is, in fact, identified as the model for the picture in a much later engraving by Noël Pruneau, in which she is shown bust-length and without attributes. Nevertheless, when, on 10 January 1750, Nattier presented to the Académie Royale trial proofs of the commissioned engraving of 'La Force' by Jean-Joseph Balechou (1716-1764), the painting was designated simply as 'la figure d'une femme, l'emblem de la Force'. Indeed, not a single known 18th-century source assigns the name of any sitter to any of Nattier's Virtues.
After Jean-Philippe d'Orléans' sudden death in 1748, Nattier reclaimed his paintings, for which he had received only partial payment. When they appeared in 1763 in Nattier's sale, three years before the artist's death, they were listed together in a single lot as 'sept dessus de porte scavoir: Quatre Vertus...'. The paintings remained together until the dispersal of the Flury-Hérard collection in 1872.
All of Nattier's paintings for the Temple were irregularly shaped for encadrements chantournés, probably to fit into rococo wall paneling. Of the three Virtues by Nattier known today, each was altered at some point after 1872 and regularized in format: both Justice and Prudence were enlarged and had their scalloped upper corners and curved bottoms filled in; 'La Force' was cut on both sides by several inches to make it upright rectanglar in format. The original dimensions of 'La Force' were 127 x 140 cm., and its original shape can be seen in Balechou's engraving (fig.1), where one can see more clearly Fortitude's lost lion.
An untraced drawing entitled 'La Force', which was perhaps a study for the Portanova picture, appeared as lot 4 in the Nattier sale of 1763. Numerous copies of the painting, which Xavier Salmon describes as 'probably the most celebrated' of the group, are recorded.
We are grateful to Joseph Baillio for his assistance in cataloguing this lot which is to be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of paintings by Jean-Marc Nattier being prepared by him with the assistance of the Wildenstein Institute.