Church patronage of art in a career of the 18th-century Parisian painter

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the problem of church patronage of fine arts in the 18th-century Paris. The predominance of secular art at the time did not lead to withdrawal between the Church and the artists who kept interacting with each other in the area of patronage, mainly of fine arts. In tracing documents and sources for this research the author deals with many academic aims, as follows: to classify church orders for the painters, to define its peculiarities, to value the meaning of church patronage for a painter at that time, to find a point of intersection of secular and religious artistic orders in the circumstances of a perpetual stream of luxurious secular orders. Meanwhile the author aims to distinguish different kinds of church assignments, such as small works for poor congregations, great altarpieces for Parisian cathedrals, paintings for monasteries usually based on sophisticated inventions (programs) understandable only by the ‘devoted’, and portraits of church leaders. Academic novelty of the article is determined by the exiguity of publications on the topic written by recent Russian researchers. In the meantime, French art historians are continually working with these problems and offer some of its solutions well-known to article’s author. The total investigation progress in this area is exemplified in the text by typical but semantically complicated works of art. The author of the article is led to a conclusion that church patronage took a considerable part of a Parisian artist’s carrier though church orders were not the main mover of artistic life of the time. Nevertheless religious painting was still an integral part of French fine art. During the 18th century the Church had been remaining to be a perpetual customer and a partner of painters settled in Paris who could fulfil a request for all kinds of high quality artistic production.