This week on the podcast we travel back to the seventeenth century, to the glorious court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, in France, and his astonishing commission for a suite of ninety-three carpets to cover the 1440-foot-long Grande Galerie at the Louvre, then a royal palace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now the proud owner of three of these carpets, the creative work of court painter Charles le Brun and court architect Louis Le Vau, and handiwork of the Savonnerie Manufactory. British decorative arts curator at the museum Wolf Burchard is on hand to discuss their convoluted history and the way in which they illustrate the baroque principle of variatas: that all things artistic be constructed along similar lines, while individually being unique and exciting.
Wolf Burchard is Curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2021 Burchard curated Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, shown at the Met, the Wallace Collection in London and the Huntington Museum in San Marino, California. Prior to joining The Met in 2019, he was Furniture Research Curator at the National Trust and Curatorial Assistant at the Royal Collection, where he co-curated The First Georgians at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace.
