Louise de La Vallière; Italy, end of the XIXth century

Louise de La Vallière; Italy, late 19th century.
"La Vallière".
Marble.
Presents inscription.
Measurements: 46 x 38 x 17 cm.

Bust carved in fine-grained white marble representing Louise de La Vallière, favorite of King Louis XIV of France. The inscription engraved on the front of the base (La Vallière) unambiguously identifies the protagonist, whose story, halfway between the splendor of Versailles and mystical renunciation, perfectly embodied the fin-de-siècle taste for historical characters with a melodramatic destiny.

The work fully responds to the principles of Art Nouveau, where the figure emerges organically from a deliberately unfinished block of marble. The face, with melancholic features, slightly drooping eyelids and a lost downward gaze, conveys a contemplative resignation that directly alludes to the spiritual retreat that marked the second life of the protagonist.

On her head she wears a lace cap carved with geometric and floral motifs, which reinforces the religious reading of the ensemble, evoking the Carmelite headdress that Louise adopted when she professed in 1674 in the convent of Saint-Jacques in Paris. The treatment of the whole is linked to the tradition of the Michelangelesque "non finito", which the symbolist and modernist sculptors reinterpreted as a metaphor for the soul that struggles to detach itself from matter. In this sense, the piece transcends the historical portrait to become an allegory of renunciation, fleeting beauty and the search for the spiritual.

The choice of Louise de La Vallière as a subject is not accidental. In the second half of the 19th century, romantic and historicist literature had popularized her figure through novels and plays that presented her story, her ascent to the Sun King's apartments, her eclipse at the hands of Madame de Montespan and her voluntary retreat to the cloister, as an exemplary tale of love, humiliation and redemption. Characters like these, who united the grandeur of a bygone era with a personal destiny charged with pathos, enjoyed enormous popularity among the enlightened bourgeoisie who consumed and commissioned this type of work.