Word: colbert
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...painting without the attributes of greatness. Eighteenth century France was a fine incubator for pictorial grandeur, as in the history pieces of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Its sexual rhetoric--think of Boucher's pink and frothy shepherdesses--was peerless. Since the reign of Louis XIV, whose minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had striven to connect the visual arts to the very essence of French gloire, every kind of official discourse had flourished in French painting and sculpture, as it did in the arts of Italy. But unofficial life--the relatively ordinary pleasures and utterances of the bourgeois center, the common protein...