Le Trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil
The Lost Carpets of King Louis XIV
When Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of finance, commissioned the carpets in 1668, Versailles was still just a hunting lodge. The young king lived at the Louvre, and the Grande Galerie was being transformed into a ceremonial corridor leading to a planned throne room. Every foreign ambassador would walk this route, treading on woven propaganda celebrating Louis XIV as the Sun King. To realise this vision, Colbert turned to the Manufacture de la Savonnerie, established in 1626 in a former soap factory (savonnerie means ‘soap works’) in Paris, a crown-controlled workshop designed to produce luxury goods and compete with expensive Ottoman and Persian imports. Between 1668 and 1688, 92 monumental hand-knotted wool carpets were produced, each roughly nine meters wide, destined to cover the entire 422-meter length of the Grande Galerie. The workload proved so massive that in 1671, a rival workshop run by the aristocratic du Pont family merged with the Savonnerie to get everything done. In total, the weaving took 20 years.
Then history intervened. Louis XIV shifted his court permanently to Versailles after Colbert’s death in 1683, and the carpets, completed in 1688 were never installed. At Versailles, his artistic advisor Charles Le Brun reportedly refused to have them compete with his painted vaults in the Hall of Mirrors. The carpets languished in storage. During the French Revolution, many were sold off, cut into fragments, gifted away, or simply lost. Only 41 of the original 92 survived, and just 33 remain intact.
For the first time in 350 years, roughly 30 of these carpets were brought together at the Grand Palais in Paris for the exhibition ‘Le Trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil’. Alberto travelled to Paris especially to see them and it is easy to understand why. For someone who has spent a lifetime in the world of textile art, standing before these carpets must have felt like a rare encounter with history itself, finally fulfilling what they were always meant to be: an overwhelming statement of ambition that not even the Sun King himself ever witnessed.
