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拍品專文
A hallucinatory fantasy of vengeance, madness and black magic, The Destruction of the Palace of Armida emerges as one of the most audacious inventions of eighteenth-century French narrative painting and the undisputed chef-d’oeuvre of Charles-Antoine Coypel. Signed and dated 1737, the canvas stands at the intersection of fine art, theatre and philosophy, embodying the hybrid intellectual pursuits of its creator. Coypel was uniquely positioned to fuse such disciplines: the youngest prodigy of a celebrated dynasty of painters – grandson of Noël Coypel (1628-1707), son of Antoine Coypel (1661-1722) and half-nephew of Noël-Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734) – he entered the Académie at only twenty-one with the grand Jason and Medea (1715; Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg). From the outset, Coypel demonstrated a restless curiosity that extended beyond painting to drama, criticism and performance. His parallel career as playwright and actor furnished him with a singular sensitivity to theatricality in pictorial art, making him, by the 1730s, the Crown’s ideal interpreter of opera and lyric drama in paint (Piganiol de La Force, op. cit.; Dilke, op. cit.; Jamieson, op. cit.).
The painting served as the modello, or 'original en petit', for Coypel’s third design in the celebrated Tenture des Fragments de l’Opéra, a suite of four monumental tapestry designs that were commissioned by the French Crown between 1733 and 1741 for the private apartments of Queen Marie Leszczynska at Versailles. Woven at the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins, the series distilled the passions of the French stage into the decorative and dynastic medium of tapestry, several examples of which survive, the best preserved in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Schnapper, op. cit.; Trésors des musées du nord de la France, op. cit.; Lefrançois, op. cit.). If Coypel had already proved his mastery of literary narrative in visual form through his twenty-eight tapestry cartoons after Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the Fragments de l’Opéra demanded an even greater range: a painter equally conversant with theatrical gesture, stagecraft and the operatic sublime.
Here, Coypel turned to Armide (1686), Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédie lyrique, composed to a libretto by Philippe Quinault and inspired by Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), the most celebrated epic poem of the Italian Renaissance. In the opera, the sorceress Armide is commanded to defeat the Christian knight Renaud, only to fall in love with him. Ensnaring him with enchantments, she imprisons him within a pleasure garden of her own making, only to realise that his devotion has been won through illusion rather than affection. The fifth and final act, set within her enchanted palace, provides the basis for the present scene. After the lovers’ only moment of intimacy in the gardens, Armide descends to the Underworld to lament before the demons her helpless bondage to Renaud. It is during her absence that the crusader’s companions discover him, break the spell and rouse him to abandon the sorceress and return to his destiny. Coypel seizes on the operatic cataclysm: Armide oscillates between despair and fury at Renaud’s desertion, borne aloft on a dragon, the preparatory study for which was sold at Christie's, New York, 27 January 2022, from the collection of Pierre Durand (lot 199; fig. 1). In a frenzy of self-immolation, she summons her infernal legions to obliterate her magical palace in a paroxysm of ruin. Demons erupt from the earth, clouds churn above, architecture collapses – the pictorial rhetoric structured as a crescendo that parallels the musical climax of Lully’s score (Ingersoll-Smouse, op. cit.; Bell, op. cit.). The crowding of diablerie, the aerial onslaught and the catastrophic tilt of the collapsing architecture evoke Jacques Callot’s celebrated 1635 etching of The Temptation of Saint Anthony (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; fig. 2), whose demonic tumult would have offered an obvious visual precedent for the opera’s climactic storm of demons.
The translation of this modello into the vast finished cartoon occupied Coypel for a full year. Completed in 1738, the cartoon has resided in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, since 1872. Yet while the cartoons passed into the possession of the Crown, the artist retained the modelli, dispersing them selectively among friends and patrons. This particular canvas is recorded in 1750 as a gift from Coypel to the distinguished portraitist Jean-Louis Tocqué (1696-1772), marking the latter’s reception into the Académie with his portrait of Le Normant de Tournehem. Its absence from Tocqué’s estate in 1772 suggests it had left his collection by then, though the precise circumstances remain unknown (Lefrançois, op. cit., 1994).
The Destruction of the Palace of Armida must therefore be seen not only as a dazzling feat of painterly drama but also as a rare survival of Coypel’s tapestry practice in oil. Conceived at the height of his career as Premier peintre du roi and later praised by critics from Piganiol to Schnapper, it demonstrates the fusion of painter, dramatist and theorist in a single hand (Piganiol de La Force, op. cit.; Schnapper, op. cit.; Bell, op. cit.). Few works of the period so vividly crystallise the Enlightenment fascination with the interplay of illusion, theatre and spectacle, and in this sense the painting endures as a singular masterpiece – both Coypel’s most ambitious experiment and his most enduring triumph.
The painting served as the modello, or 'original en petit', for Coypel’s third design in the celebrated Tenture des Fragments de l’Opéra, a suite of four monumental tapestry designs that were commissioned by the French Crown between 1733 and 1741 for the private apartments of Queen Marie Leszczynska at Versailles. Woven at the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins, the series distilled the passions of the French stage into the decorative and dynastic medium of tapestry, several examples of which survive, the best preserved in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Schnapper, op. cit.; Trésors des musées du nord de la France, op. cit.; Lefrançois, op. cit.). If Coypel had already proved his mastery of literary narrative in visual form through his twenty-eight tapestry cartoons after Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the Fragments de l’Opéra demanded an even greater range: a painter equally conversant with theatrical gesture, stagecraft and the operatic sublime.
Here, Coypel turned to Armide (1686), Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédie lyrique, composed to a libretto by Philippe Quinault and inspired by Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), the most celebrated epic poem of the Italian Renaissance. In the opera, the sorceress Armide is commanded to defeat the Christian knight Renaud, only to fall in love with him. Ensnaring him with enchantments, she imprisons him within a pleasure garden of her own making, only to realise that his devotion has been won through illusion rather than affection. The fifth and final act, set within her enchanted palace, provides the basis for the present scene. After the lovers’ only moment of intimacy in the gardens, Armide descends to the Underworld to lament before the demons her helpless bondage to Renaud. It is during her absence that the crusader’s companions discover him, break the spell and rouse him to abandon the sorceress and return to his destiny. Coypel seizes on the operatic cataclysm: Armide oscillates between despair and fury at Renaud’s desertion, borne aloft on a dragon, the preparatory study for which was sold at Christie's, New York, 27 January 2022, from the collection of Pierre Durand (lot 199; fig. 1). In a frenzy of self-immolation, she summons her infernal legions to obliterate her magical palace in a paroxysm of ruin. Demons erupt from the earth, clouds churn above, architecture collapses – the pictorial rhetoric structured as a crescendo that parallels the musical climax of Lully’s score (Ingersoll-Smouse, op. cit.; Bell, op. cit.). The crowding of diablerie, the aerial onslaught and the catastrophic tilt of the collapsing architecture evoke Jacques Callot’s celebrated 1635 etching of The Temptation of Saint Anthony (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; fig. 2), whose demonic tumult would have offered an obvious visual precedent for the opera’s climactic storm of demons.
The translation of this modello into the vast finished cartoon occupied Coypel for a full year. Completed in 1738, the cartoon has resided in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, since 1872. Yet while the cartoons passed into the possession of the Crown, the artist retained the modelli, dispersing them selectively among friends and patrons. This particular canvas is recorded in 1750 as a gift from Coypel to the distinguished portraitist Jean-Louis Tocqué (1696-1772), marking the latter’s reception into the Académie with his portrait of Le Normant de Tournehem. Its absence from Tocqué’s estate in 1772 suggests it had left his collection by then, though the precise circumstances remain unknown (Lefrançois, op. cit., 1994).
The Destruction of the Palace of Armida must therefore be seen not only as a dazzling feat of painterly drama but also as a rare survival of Coypel’s tapestry practice in oil. Conceived at the height of his career as Premier peintre du roi and later praised by critics from Piganiol to Schnapper, it demonstrates the fusion of painter, dramatist and theorist in a single hand (Piganiol de La Force, op. cit.; Schnapper, op. cit.; Bell, op. cit.). Few works of the period so vividly crystallise the Enlightenment fascination with the interplay of illusion, theatre and spectacle, and in this sense the painting endures as a singular masterpiece – both Coypel’s most ambitious experiment and his most enduring triumph.