A Material World | A Fairy Tale Defense of Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault
Talk by Jennifer Davis Taylor (Warburg Institute).
Charles Perrault is best known for writing beloved fairy tales like Cinderella and Puss in Boots, but he also held prestigious roles as a member of the Académie Française and a civil servant for the King’s Buildings under Louis XIV. Beyond his literary fame, Perrault was a skilled designer who masterfully combined word and image to explore themes of art, metaphysics, human nature, politics, and gender roles.
Many of his designs were lost in a fire at the Bibliothèque du Louvre in 1871. However, a treatise on the art of the device, or motto, has recently been rediscovered. In this presentation,Jennifer discusses the device Perrault created for the manuscript of his Contes, which serves as an introduction to this art form that was central to Perrault's larger body of work. This particular device was crafted as a portrait for Princess Elizabeth Charlotte D'Orleans, and the manuscript's painted decoration underscores Perrault's consistent views on women.
Following this, Jennifer examines the iconographic programs for two of Perrault’s projects: the Labyrinthe de Versailles and Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts. The Labyrinthe de Versailles was used by Perrault to compare men and women, while Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts featured a series of paintings that adorned Perrault's personal study. Both works are set in an Edenic space that reflects Perrault’s vision of the role of women in a perfectly ordered world.
Jennifer Davis Taylor studied at the Warburg Institute in London where she specialised in Art and Intellectual History of 17th-century France. In her PhD project, she demonstrated a completely new way of reading Charles Perrault's works: as though they are the polished output of a designer and iconographer whose themes are revealed typologically and through the interdependence of word and image, and whose skill in relating word and image transferred easily into the designing of grand iconographic programs for interiors and gardens. Since February 2024 she has been designing Art History curriculum for the International School of Greenville, a private school accredited by the French Ministry of Education. In June, she will present her talk, "Art, Politics, and Quantum Mechanics" at the Cognitive Futures Conference in Catania, Italy.
This event took place on 28 May 2024.
This event was part of the series A Material World: Gender, which brings together academics and heritage professionals from a wide range of disciplines to discuss issues concerning historical objects, their materials, forms, and functions, as well as their conservation, presentation, display, and reconstruction.
