"It is time to be old, To take in sail:-- The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Comes to me in his fatal rounds, And says: "No more!" -Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Terminus
In 1897 a young man from St. Petersburg, Alexandre Benois (1870-1960), visited Versailles for the first time. Although he planned to become a lawyer, Versailles sidetracked him. His series of imaginary watercolor drawings, The Promenades of Louis XIV, won the attention of impresario Serge Diaghilev, who hired Benois to design sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. His greatest triumph would be Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911.
In 1897 a young man from St. Petersburg, Alexandre Benois (1870-1960), visited Versailles for the first time. Although he planned to become a lawyer, Versailles sidetracked him. His series of imaginary watercolor drawings, The Promenades of Louis XIV, won the attention of impresario Serge Diaghilev, who hired Benois to design sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. His greatest triumph would be Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911.
What inspired the young Benois and why did he keep returning to Versailles for inspiration? Perhaps, in the first instance, homesickness for the vastness of St. Petersburg's Palace Square drew him the sweeping planes surrounding the empty chateau. Perhaps Haussmann's orderly boulevards made Paris feel claustrophobic to the young Russian. Perhaps growing up saturated in stories of Peter the Great prepared him to wonder what kind of life the Sun King led on the great stage he had made for him. Perhaps a stage was what Benois needed to unleash his imagination.
From Versailles to the modern ballet was not so far. The gods danced again, from Daphnis et Chloe to Apollon Musagete. And around seemingly every corner at Versailles, statuary surveyed visitors like some mythological deity - Terminus, the Roman boundary keeper. Boundary stones, called termini in his honor, were erected to guard Roman fields against trespassers. The philosopher Plato had written that an orderly landscape was the cornerstone of political stability. Roman law fixed the sacred boundary space at two and one half feet, wide enough for walking, worshipping, and patrolling. The punishment for violators (moving the stones) was to be burned alive. Today, the jack o'lantern is a secular descendant of the termini.
Benois, the Russian, was the product of a world both harsher and more wonderful than the bourgeois world we inhabit.
4 comments:
For someone who knew nothing about Benois, I thought this was terrific. The primary focus of my own article was Diaghilev, but I created a link to you, to include the people who knew him. Many thanks.
Hels, I had thought to feature "The Sun King's Promenade" on April Fools' Day for its obvious humor. Benois is one of those poeple hidden in plain sight by history. Once you start noticing, his name crops up frequently. Thanks, as always to you.
These are fantastic and visionary. I love the perspective of the 2nd one.
Kate, it may be that the spatial sense needed to design workable stage sets was a method that Benois employed to select his perspectives so freely when working in just two dimensions.
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