Fernando Ribaudo - LOUISE LE BRUN (1665 -1728 ) - La...

I am Fernando Ribaudo, a 63-year-old Roman artist, scenographer for 42 years, and today devoted to my lifelong passion: painting. My grandfather frescoed churches in Sicily, my father produced paintings for America. A dreamer and student. My painting is born where Caravaggio meets the symbol. I study the ancient light of the Baroque masters to tell dreams, fears, and modern allegories. I use oil on linen canvas, with glazes and chiaroscuro. Each of my paintings is a theater. The protagonists are nudes, skulls, felines, and candles. I do not paint reality. I paint its secret. ..and here is my new fable, to be told by candlelight.. In the painting appears the daughter of the greatest French painter of the 1600s, the painter of the Sun King: Charles Le Brun (1619-1690). First painter to Louis XIV and director of the French Academy. The one who painted Versailles. Official painter, dictator of French Baroque taste. He had a secret daughter never recognized, conceived in Rome while studying under Poussin. TITLE OF THE PAINTING: LOUISE LE BRUN (1665-1728) - The Secret Daughter of Versailles in the Tower on the Rhone Oil on canvas. 50 x 50 cm. Symbolic realism with a French Baroque and Venetian matrix. The composition recalls Le Brun’s court painting at Versailles, and Titian’s Venus copied in Rome. Theatrical chiaroscuro à la Georges de La Tour. The tricolor drapery—white, red, blue—is the color of France. Composition: In the center, back to the viewer, stands Louise Le Brun, Charles Le Brun’s secret daughter. She is 18, with black hair cut in the French style, her back entirely tattooed. The tattoos are not decoration. They are the bozzetti of Versailles ceiling frescoes that her father had her copy as a child in Rome, transformed into baroque demons. She wears only a white veil and a red and blue cloak, the colors of the King. She looks at her father’s Venus hanging on the wall. On the table unfolds her studio of rebellion: The crystal ball with eyes inside: her father’s Augenspiegel. Inside are her eyes. Her father looked at Versailles; she looks within herself. The open Tarot cards fanned out and Louis XIV’s gold coins: the courtly game of fate, the King’s payment. The skull, the gold pocket watch with chain, the hourglass and the inkwell with goose quill: French Vanitas. Tempus fugit of Versailles. Her father painted the eternity of the King; she felt the King’s death drawing near. The silver vase with putti: Le Brun’s vase for the Apollo Gallery at Versailles, stolen from his studio. Around them, nature. Two jaguars roar, two black panthers, two lynxes, a cat, a rabbit. They are Le Brun’s heraldic animals. Le Brun painted lions and leopards for the King’s tapestries at Gobelins. His daughter has freed them, and now they snarl at her. They do not attack. They judge her. Historical elements and quotations: 1. The arched window opens onto the Rhone and a French-style castle, as in Poussin’s backgrounds. It’s the France Le Brun left in Rome. It’s the freedom his daughter yearns for. 2. The painting within the painting: on the left, in a baroque carved frame, a nude Venus seated. It is Le Brun’s Venus copied by Titian in Rome in 1642 when he was Poussin’s pupil. Her father painted it as an allegory of drawing. Her daughter looks at it from the back because she no longer wants to be drawn by her father. 3. The red velvet drapes: they are Versailles’s drapes. Le Brun placed them behind all of the Sun King’s portraits. Here they separate the daughter from the father. Description of the painting: Louise Le Brun does not pose. She turns around. It is the last day in her father’s studio, in the towers by the Rhone. Tomorrow her father Charles Le Brun will be consecrated to Versailles, and she will be erased as the illegitimate daughter of Rome. Then she has herself tattooed with all Versailles’s secrets on her back and has herself painted from the back, so that no one can say she is only the daughter of a French painter. She brought fortune, money, and fame to anyone who spoke to her, to anyone who had seen her fluttering nearly naked in the galleries, and to anyone who gave her a look, as in this painting, where her beauty remained eternal and immortal.

Utropspris:SEK 11,138.73

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