Kingship in the Royal Context
The fortunes of the Capetian house flourished during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. When the first copy of the Grandes Chroniques was decorated shortly after the death of Louis IX in 1270, the Capetians were in firm control of France. By the reign of Philip the Fair (1285–1314), France was the dominant power in Europe, able to challenge and defeat even the pope. Although the last Capetians, Louis X (1314–16), Philip V (1316–22), and Charles IV (1322–28), were troubled by a dearth of male heirs, the institution of the monarchy remained powerful.[1]
Popular commissions responded to the concerns of the reigning king. Before Saint Louis, references to French kingship were couched most frequently in terms of the biblical antecedents of the French monarchs, the kings of Judah.[2] Depictions of kings from the Old Testament mingled with those of queens and prophets in jamb statues, such as those at Saint-Denis and Chartres; later, sculpted
Old Testament kings predominated in the galleries on the facades of cathedrals.[3] Galleries of kings may have been more explicitly dynastic; as early as the thirteenth century, literary references document the popular perception that the statues in the gallery of Notre-Dame represented kings of France.[4]
Ceremony and art dealing more specifically with the king also associated biblical with French kingship. One of the most important ceremonies to do this was the French coronation, versions of which were drafted around 1230 and again around 1250.[5] The sculpture of Reims cathedral, the site of the royal coronation, commemorates in more durable form the equation of Old Testament and French rulers expressed in the words of the coronation ceremony. Thus on at least one level, the interior facade of Reims is, as Sadler has shown, a collection of biblical exempla directed to the newly crowned king.[6]
Pictorial programs focusing on kingship evolved during the reigns of the last Capetians. Early commissions executed for Louis IX continued to portray kingship in terms of Old Testament models. For instance, artists depicted biblical scenes in a group of Parisian monuments in manuscript and stained glass executed for Louis. These emphasized human rather than divine action and concentrated primarily on Old Testament kings.[7] The changed subject matter and new narrative style in these cycles invested religious history with a "new prescriptive force" to become an example for royal behavior.[8] After Louis's canonization in 1297, hagiographic programs, frequently presented within a dynastic framework, became more common at court.[9] The presence of a royal saint allowed subsequent rulers such as Philip III or Philip the Fair to glorify the royal house by promoting the cult of their saintly forebear.[10]
During the reign of the last Capetian kings, royal commissions, whether biblical, hagiographic, or dynastic, manifested concern with legitimacy and dynastic continuity.[11] Increasingly, courtly commissions emphasized the continuous succession of the three races of French kings, a succession whose length and holiness, confirmed by the sainthood of Louis IX, were the subject of the Grandes Chroniques de France .