<italic>Collecting Versailles: scriptural economies of the</italic> Cabinet du Roi: Fid-Bau Portal

Collecting Versailles: scriptural economies of the Cabinet du Roi

Goldstein, Claire

The word ‘land’ (in French ‘terre’) inhabits a semantic field that connotes stability, implying notions such as ‘territory’, ‘ownership’ and ‘conquest’. In early modern Europe, where a noble person is called after his or her property, land is also conunensurate with identity. As exemplified by the figure of Anteus, land is the most stable thing we can imagine having under our feet. It therefore seems especially perverse that gardens — estheticised, theatrical presentations of land — resist these forces of stasis. Gardens are orchestras of millions of living (and simultaneously dying) organisms. Gardens exist in time, changing inexorably with each passing moment, modulation of light or gentle breeze. Thierry Mariage observes: ‘it is significant that voyage (travel) and paysage (landscape) have a cornmon suffix derived from the Latin agere, which means to move ahead, implying both movement and regeneration’. This transience may be one of the many reasons why people are moved to fix gardens and landscapes in representations. Not because the land is eternal, but because it is evanescent. If gardens represent stability, they do so by virtue of being grounded in supplemental representations.