The Decoration of the Chapelle de la Congrégation des Nobles
As Lubin Baugin lived close to the Jesuit monastery, he seems to have had close connections with the order, especially between 1647 and 1651. It was a monastery where members of the order made their professions of faith, and it housed eminent priests, confessors to kings, great theologians and scientists. At the beginning of the 17th Century, this monastery grew in importance, being linked to the monarchy and housing a first cenotaph for the heart of Henri IV. In 1625, expansion became imperative. Thus, Louis XIII laid the first stone of the first Jesuit church in France on 7 March 1627, and the first mass was celebrated there in May 1641. In 1643 the church received the heart of Louis XIII from Anne of Austria and erected a monument for it. The Society paid great attention to the entire decorative programme, both in recognition of the importance attached to their establishment and as a vector for spiritual attitudes. Simon Vouet (cf the Présentation au temple in the Louvre), Philippe de Champaigne (whose La Vierge intercédant en faveur des âmes du Purgatoire is in the Musée des Augustins) and Claude Vignon were commissioned to decorate the high altar.
The decoration of the Chapelle de la Congrégation des Nobles was therefore a particularly prestigious commission for Lubin Baugin to receive. A sort of brotherhood of nobles united in a spiritual group, they used to meet in the monastery to meditate. Resuming medieval tradition, the Jesuits reserved devotions to the Virgin for them. The plan of the chapel's decoration has since disappeared, but it was comprised of twelve pictures by Baugin placed on the side walls of the chapel, while sixteen small pictures formed a freize on the upper part. As Jacques Thuillier points out, "the elegant softness of his art and the subtle clarity that illuminates his canvases without depriving them of their mystery are in complete harmony with the devotion to Mary extolled by the Jesuits". Amongst the works that have come down to us, it was exciting to discover the Présentation de la Vierge au temple in Aix-en-Provence, a preparatory drawing and painted sketch of which are owned by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. Aix-en-Provence's Musée Granet also has La Nativité de la Vierge. Pictures of two moments particularly precious to devotees of Mary, La Conception de la Vierge et l'Assomption, were discovered in 1967 by Pierre-Marie Auzas in the church of Cherré in Manie-et-Loire. These two canvases are apparently a pair, noteworthy for their iconographic rarity and also their poetry and delicacy.
|
