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AB - In a drawing dated 1714, the architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord illustrated two chimneypiece designs for the redecoration of the Hôtel de Pomponne in Paris (Fig. 1).1 The house had belonged to the family of Simon Arnauld de Pomponne, a minister and diplomat to Louis XIV. In 1713, his daughter sold the property to the receiver-general Michel Bellier, who undertook renovations with the aid of Oppenord. The architect, who was similarly refurbishing the Palais Royal at the time, took creative license with the decoration, noting how the pilasters and scrolls morph into shells and vegetal motifs.2 An exuberantly framed mirror tops the composition and encloses a second ornamental option that appears reflected by its surface. On the inset panel to the left, he playfully alluded to nature’s classical elements: water, at the base, represented by a fountain; earth, illustrated by the tree growing by its source; and air, whose billowing smoke supports the winged figure and ornamental cap above. He conspicuously omitted fire, given that the chimneypiece’s very use put the element into action. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Gilles-Marie Oppenord, Designs for chimneypieces at the Hôtel de Pomponne, Paris, c.1714, pen, ink, and chalk on paper, 79.1 x 27.4 cm. Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York (Photo: Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum/Art Resource). Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Gilles-Marie Oppenord, Designs for chimneypieces at the Hôtel de Pomponne, Paris, c.1714, pen, ink, and chalk on paper, 79.1 x 27.4 cm. Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York (Photo: Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum/Art Resource). Oppenord’s design drew from recent decorative inventions at Versailles, where the lavish use of marble and glass testified to the kingdom’s manufacturing strength and artistic sophistication. Called the ‘cheminée à la royale’, the iconic French fireplace has long been categorised as part of the stylistic evolution that gave rise to the Rococo—this, in part, due to its dramatic formal transformation, which witnessed the receding of the over-mantle into the depth of the wall and the ample use of rounded forms and flat reflective surfaces.3 As such, it has typically been classified as a purely ornamental invention. Like no other furnishing at the time, however, the ‘cheminée à la royale’ brought together architecture’s decorative, material, and sensorial dimensions to scientific and philosophical consequence. This article examines the artistic and technological conditions adjoining the redesign of the French fireplace, as developed at the royal atelier of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, circulated in commercial prints by Pierre Lepautre and Jean Bérain the Elder, among others, and theorised by scientists shortly thereafter. Specifically, the aim is to consider how the forms, materials, and technologies employed in its making contributed to period understandings of fire, heat, and sensation at the turn of the eighteenth century. What began as a luxurious furnishing at Versailles thus set the template for understanding physical phenomena (as well as the bodily effects that they engendered) and, in the process, brought architecture and decoration into critical dialogue with art, science, and the political ambitions of the absolutist state. As a case study, the royal fireplace challenges notions of architectural invention that presume causality between function and form and intentionality in artistic meaning. To tell its story, the article is structured according to four questions that chronicle its development, manufacturing, diffusion, and theorisation: How did practical developments in building technology enable the fireplace's decorative reinvention at the turn of the eighteenth century? In what ways did the use of marble and glass imbue the object with noble associations? How did the commercial diffusion of the royal model intersect with a more sensorial approach to space planning and decoration in residential architecture? How did the experiments on the interior, joined with the concomitant theorisation of fire, help initiate an architecture of the senses—one, interestingly, whose science claimed reliance on the fireplace’s decorative embellishment? Technology and Furnishing the Interior The fireplace had been an integral component of French residential architecture since at least the medieval period, with its earliest height measuring upwards of six pieds.4 By the seventeenth century, its inclusion became regarded as the foremost commodité, or amenity, of a home.5 For the financially comfortable, all major rooms and half of all secondary rooms were equipped with one. Ancient sources and Italian precedents offered limited practical guidance, given that the colder northern climate demanded more robust models for heating during the winter months.6 Where its appearance was concerned, artistry and utilitarian demands conditioned the fireplace's form in mostly independent ways, meaning that decoration and technology were in a dialogic as opposed to strictly causal relationship. Only at the end of the seventeenth century would the two reach a moment of synthesis, diminishing the hearth’s monumentality and making the decorative inventions of the following century possible. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, architects attended primarily to the chimneypiece’s sculptural potential, circulating options in wood and stone on the commercial print market. The architect Jacques Androuet du Cerceau dedicated the first twenty-one pages of his Second livre d'architecture (1561) to their design.7 Later, the engraver Antoine Pierretz the Younger evoked the tenets of the classical tradition in his Divers desseins de Cheminées à la Royalle (1647), which included chimneypieces adorned with scrolls, pilasters, allegorical sculpture, and scenes from the Bible and Roman mythology in painting and relief (Fig. 2).8 A book published by Jean Barbet and engraved by Abraham Bosse categorised fireplaces alongside altarpieces, thereby claiming a similarity in their composition and symbolic association.9 In such instances, the designs drew from Renaissance notions of solidity, whereby monumental form connoted efficiency in operation. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Antoine Pierretz, Chimneypiece from Divers desseins de Cheminées à la Royalle, 1647, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Antoine Pierretz, Chimneypiece from Divers desseins de Cheminées à la Royalle, 1647, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). In terms of theory, early French architectural treatises made only sporadic references to the fireplace on technological grounds. In his Manière de bien bastir (1623), the architect Pierre Le Muet advised that builders centre them on the wall opposite a room’s entry, which supported a simple and uniform arrangement of apartments from one floor to the next (Fig. 3).10 A straight stack resulted in the fireplace’s overstatement on the upper levels, noting the empty cavity behind the hearth on the floor plan to the right. This approach concerned interior space planning, called distribution, as well as safety, which aimed to minimise the dangers related to fire and smoke inhalation. In his Architecture françoise (1624), the doctor Louis Savot outlined how the proportions of the hearth, size of the flue, and ventilation within the house helped prevent fuming.11 He cited Jean Bernard's Sauvegarde pour ceux qui craignent la fumée (1621), which theorised the composition of smoke and made recommendations to avoid sooty fireplaces. One should construct chimneys as funnels, Bernard advised, with the widest opening at the top, which allowed smoke to lighten and disseminate as it rose.12 The suggestion drew an analogy between body and building, noting how one’s nostrils similarly funnelled outward, which facilitated breathing and prevented dirty particles from entering the body. In this instance, man’s God-given form served as the primary reference guiding architecture’s theorisation as both an art and science. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Pierre Le Muet, Floor plan of an hôtel from Manière de bien bastir, 1623, etching and engraving. Typ 615.23.515, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Photo: Harvard University). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Pierre Le Muet, Floor plan of an hôtel from Manière de bien bastir, 1623, etching and engraving. Typ 615.23.515, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Photo: Harvard University). Other accounts set aside explicit references to human anatomy, tending instead to the importance of national custom. François Blondel, the military engineer and first director of the Académie royale d’architecture (est. 1671), placed chimneypieces between doorframes and triumphal arches in his Cours d’architecture (1675, 1683), which served as the basis for French academic curriculum. ‘Regarding fireplaces’, he wrote, one can consider their form, their placement, their disposition, their measurements & their ornaments. Because while they have everywhere the same use, which is to heat the spaces where they are located, without being inconvenienced with smoke; they are nevertheless made very differently in their form & in their other essential parts according to the differences of the Country.13 Blondel drew from practical and theoretical sources. The Germans and Dutch preferred wood-burning stoves in sheet metal, which the English frequently placed in their cabinets. In Italy, Palladio cautioned against flues that were too large or too small. If oversized, he warned, the stack would accept impurities with every gust of wind. A narrow cavity risked improper ventilation, causing a room to fill with smoke. In comparing Roman and Lombard building practices with local traditions, Blondel wrote of how walls in France were thinner than elsewhere and, citing the Paris building code, specified the need for an additional reinforcing member of 22 cm backing the hearth for protection.14 These recommendations spoke as much to architecture’s theoretical and stylistic evolution as they did to questions of public safety and science during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. London’s Great Fire of 1666 sparked fear of death and destruction among many in the French capital and prompted the reform of several building practices. A parliamentary ordinance passed in 1667, for instance, prohibited timber on public ways and limited building heights to 48 pieds.15 In 1672, the Police Lieutenancy established construction standards for chimneys and forbade carpenters from anchoring beams into their structure.16 Michel de Frémin, the amateur architectural theorist and President of the Bureau des Finances, went so far as to propose a fully ‘smokeless’ fireplace, whose shape and placement in the home ensured a salubrious interior immune from the flames’ potential ravages.17 By his surmising (which relied on a crude understanding of the physical sciences), smoke filled a room when the humidity of the hearth’s air, wood, and fire neared equilibrium. Reducing the flue’s depth by half, he claimed, decreased the air’s moisture, which eliminated its weight and ensured that smoke be drawn up the stack. Despite its repeated regulatory attention at the hand of architects and administrators, the residential fireplace has attracted limited technical analysis. The historian Joan DeJean is correct in noting the poor working efficiency of most models from the period.18 In her study of the modern interior, she lamented the fact that their decorative reinvention at the turn of the eighteenth century failed to incorporate the simultaneous advances in thermal energy, of which the creation of the steam engine in 1698 was the most notable. Yet, new building techniques developed at the time influenced the chimneypiece’s evolution in remarkable, if less obvious, ways.19 The plates adjoining Augustin-Charles d’Aviler’s popular architectural manual from 1691, for example, make clear that the categories of interior decoration and building science coalesced during the process of construction (Figs 4 and 5). The first plate shows how masons began obliquely staggering ducts across the wall to ensure the fireplace’s uniform placement from one floor to the next. D’Aviler accounted for the open hearth on the lower level, used for cooking, and provided a plan of the dispersed stacks at the height of the entablature.20 ‘Fireplaces in private buildings used to be placed one in front of the other’, he wrote. ‘[B]ut as they overloaded the Floor, & advanced too far into the Rooms, we have corrected this defect by arranging them along the wall, & diverting the flues’.21 This minimised the fireplace’s extrusion into the room and, by its reduced size, the object functioned more as an interior furnishing than a monumental and sculptural object in the tradition of the Renaissance. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Chimney ducts from Cours d’architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole, 1691, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Chimney ducts from Cours d’architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole, 1691, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Chimneypiece from Cours d’architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole, 1691, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Chimneypiece from Cours d’architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole, 1691, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). This approach to building assembly was one of the most significant developments in late seventeenth-century construction, given that it understood the efficiency of building systems outside a purely formal register.22 On the interior, the flue protruded less than in past models, with the degree of embellishment depending less on the building structure and more on the use of the room and grandeur of the patron.23 The second plate of d’Aviler’s manual included wainscoting and other ornaments, which suggested that the object belonged to a larger decorative ensemble (though the painted scenes of fire and smoke above the mantle nevertheless hinted at the chimneypiece's utilitarian function). He acknowledged the possible inclusion of a mirror, represented by the small rectangle above the hearth, marked K. That he discussed fireplaces immediately before distribution suggests the degree to which the fireplace functioned as much as an interior furnishing as it did an organising element for space planning.24 The synthesis of decoration and building technology, in other words, went hand-in-hand with the arrangement of the interior and the evolution of architectural representation at the close of the seventeenth century. Materials and Manufacturing Technology The integration of the flue into the depth of the wall granted architects and decorators added freedom when laying out and embellishing the interior. In this regard, and in contrast to previous models, a room’s ornamental treatment could effectively conceal the building’s structural and technological systems. This is not to suggest that there was autonomy to decorative creation, however.25 Katie Scott has illustrated at length how interior décor played a crucial social function in eighteenth-century France, whereby the type and degree of ornamentation correlated with the rank and dignity of the patron (categories that became increasingly vexed during the century).26 Nowhere was this display of wealth and status more apparent than at Versailles, where architecture and decoration served to glorify the king. Here, the forms and materials of the marble and mirror-topped French fireplace related not to heat efficiency or smoke management but instead to political spectacle and the display of the kingdom's mercantile ambitions. In this case, decorative invention and the state sponsorship of technology developed in tandem: Manufacturing initiatives by the crown made possible the new and expanded use of glass and marble in period décor. The king's construction endeavours at Versailles financially supported those institutions at the forefront of technical innovation (glass manufacturers, marble quarries, and even scientists at the Academy) while also providing plentiful materials for architectural experimentation. Only later, with the fireplace's commercial dissemination beyond the rarefied confines of Versailles, would its forms and materials be theorised for their functional utility and relationship to comfort. One would be hard pressed to claim a purely practical foundation for the iconic model as developed at the king’s private retreat at Marly by the architect, ornamentalist, and draughtsman Pierre Lepautre (Fig. 6).27 In its mature form, it included a carved marble mantelpiece at chest height topped by a framed mirror, frequently arched. A cast-iron plate backed the interior of the hearth, offering protection and space for decorative flourishes. A masque in stucco crowned the composition, with gilt reliefs animating the space between the mirror and the underside of the crown moulding. Curved edges and flat reflective surfaces replaced the sculptural forms illustrated in previous examples. Lepautre’s print included panelling to the left and right, which implied the object’s integration with the room’s decorative programme. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Pierre Lepautre, Frontispiece of Livre de cheminées executes à Marly sur les desseins de Monsr. Mansant, 1699, etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource). Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Pierre Lepautre, Frontispiece of Livre de cheminées executes à Marly sur les desseins de Monsr. Mansant, 1699, etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource). The development and diffusion of the royal fireplace is credited to the heavy hand of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Premier Architecte to Louis XIV and, from 1699 until his death in 1708, Surintendant of the Bâtiments du Roi, the bureau that managed royal construction projects across the kingdom.28 He began work at Marly in 1679, shortly before his nomination as Premier Architecte, and renovations continued into the early eighteenth century.29 The château was the site where the king supposedly escaped the rigours of court protocol. Its exuberance testified to Louis XIV’s architectural imagination, with the central salon having four magnificent mirror-topped chimneypieces (Fig. 7).30 According to Hardouin-Mansart’s documents, the king requested drawings for the reconceived model on 31 January 1699.31 That year, the architect replaced nearly all of Marly’s existing fireplaces, with records indicating those intended for his closest of kin, including his morganatic wife Madame de Maintenon, their son the Duke of Maine, and his nephew Philippe II, the Duke of Orléans. A work order placed on 27 April 1699 specified that a framed mirrored console be placed opposite those fireplaces in his bedroom and cabinet.32 In these rooms, the solid space fell between two equally sized windows, and the reverberating light created a graceful effect suitable for the king’s private chambers. Afterwards, this became common decorative practice among French elites. At that same time, Hardouin-Mansart was similarly refurbishing the Château de Meudon near Versailles, the home of the Grand Dauphin.33 Jean Bérain the Elder, then the director of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (the branch of the king's household that attended to royal spectacles), made significant contributions to its redecoration, and it is likely that one magnificent print, festooned with grotesques and dedicated to Hardouin-Mansart, depicts one of his many creations (Fig. 8).34 Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Château de Marly (1679–96), Section from 1711–14, pen, ink, and crayon on paper. O1 1472, no. 5, Archives nationales (France), Paris (Photo: Archives nationales (France)). Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Château de Marly (1679–96), Section from 1711–14, pen, ink, and crayon on paper. O1 1472, no. 5, Archives nationales (France), Paris (Photo: Archives nationales (France)). Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Jean Bérain the Elder, Frontispiece of Ornemens inventez par Jean Bérain, c.1700, etching and engraving. Bibliothèque numérique de l’INHA—Fol est 498 (Photo: Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art). Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Jean Bérain the Elder, Frontispiece of Ornemens inventez par Jean Bérain, c.1700, etching and engraving. Bibliothèque numérique de l’INHA—Fol est 498 (Photo: Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art). The scale and speed of these interior renovations were only possible because of the state sponsorship and royal privileges associated with glass manufacturing and marble quarrying. In 1665, for instance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of finance under Louis XIV, founded the Royal Plate Glass Company to challenge Venetian industrial supremacy. By 1672, the king banned imports completely and granted the enterprise a monopoly on glass production (output subsequently quadrupled, given the building campaign at Versailles).35 Meredith Martin has shown how the mirrors fabricated by the company also served a diplomatic function abroad, noting the shipment of several thousand mirrors from France to Siam during the 1680s.36 By gifting these objects, the crown hoped to gain favour with the Siamese monarch, whose territories held vast reserves of tin that could be fused with glass to generate a mirror’s reflective surface. Tin transformed a transparent pane of glass into an object of sensorial wonder, meaning that trade and technology were brought together for the purposes of luxury and decorative spectacle. This became even more apparent with the invention of plate glass casting in 1687, which enabled the making of larger sheets than was possible by blowing (upwards of 227 cm by some accounts, compared to 81 cm2 by blowing) and eliminated the need for internal mullions or metallic brackets within the chimneypiece’s mirrored over-mantle (one finds these older assembly techniques in the mirrors of the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, built by Hardouin-Mansart from 1678–84).37 The technology involved the pouring of melted sand, potash or soda, cullet, and lime on a copper table and it being smoothed into flat panels by rollers.38 In 1688, the king granted exclusive rights to glass casting to Abraham Thévart, so long as his company manufactured sheets larger than those blown by Pierre Bagneux, with whom Louis XIV had an extant charter.39 Both procedures required huge furnaces, whose heat and fumes proved a hazard for workers and nearby inhabitants. Safety concerns, along with the higher cost of wood and other raw materials in Paris, prompted the crown to move large-scale manufacturing outside the city limits, with the most important location being Thévart’s complex at Saint-Gobain in Picardy. The kingdom also invested in domestic marble extraction in southwest France, which provided an important supply of stone for the king’s architectural endeavours at Versailles and helped bolster local economies left stagnant since the Fronde.40 The verdant green marble of the palace's Grands Appartements and Salon de la Guerre, for instance, came from quarries at Campan, whose exploitation was reserved for the crown.41 Most iconic was the pink stone from Languedoc, which had been excavated as early as the Roman period. For shipment purposes north, the region's pits at Caunes-Minervois were ideally situated near the Canal du Midi, which connected the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and was constructed at the behest of Colbert between 1666 and 1681. The project was a feat of hydraulic technology (albeit a costly one), given that it crossed 240 kilometres of dry, rough terrain and ascended 189 metres above sea level. The scale of its engineering firmly positioned the kingdom as the modern inheritor of Ancient Rome.42 Quarried, dressed, and transported by barge from southern France, the lush pink marble of the Grand Trianon (1687–8) and its many mirror-topped chimneypieces thus symbolised the kingdom’s mercantile ambitions by means of materials and technology. That such ventures infiltrated academic discourse is made evident by a passage included in a treatise by the court historian and art theorist André Félibien. Following an explanation of marble’s ancient and Italian varieties, he wrote: Since Monsieur Colbert has been Superintendent of Buildings, we have by his care & under his orders, discovered in France, principally along the Pyrenees, Marble of different colours. There are signs that the Romans had formerly taken marble from here, because we see in the quarries that much has been extracted, which can be found nowhere in France, and thus it must have been transported elsewhere.43 He lauded the hardness and colourful vibrancy of marble found in France, and in the process qualified the association between Roman precedents and the royal palaces of the Louvre and Versailles. The splendour of the current regime, in other words, matched the glory of the ancients by the richness of the materials employed. The state sponsorship of manufacturing similarly served a political function, whereby technological advancement substantiated royal privileges. Take, for instance, Claude Perrault’s folio of mechanical devices, published posthumously as the Recueil de plusieurs machines de nouvelle invention (1700), and, later, the seven-volume series Machines et inventions approuvées par l'Académie royale des Sciences (1735–77).44 One impressive machine showcased by the latter employed gear technology to slice marble block. Endorsed by the Académie royale des sciences in 1700, it proposed harnessing a horse to a rotating mechanism, whose transfer and augmentation of torque produced enough force to saw through crystallised rock (Fig. 9).45 By the Academy’s words, this required only four revolutions by the casually trotting beast. Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Machine for slicing marble invented by Mr Fonsjean in 1700, from Machines et inventions approuvée par l’Académie Royale des Sciences, etching and engraving. Typ 715.35.112, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Photo: Harvard University). Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Machine for slicing marble invented by Mr Fonsjean in 1700, from Machines et inventions approuvée par l’Académie Royale des Sciences, etching and engraving. Typ 715.35.112, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Photo: Harvard University). At Versailles, the development of the ‘cheminée à la royale’ testified to the centrality of royal spectacle and the state sponsorship of materials and manufacturing. In this regard, advancements in decoration and technology unfolded in the service of each other: The glazed over-mantles engraved by Lepautre and Bérain, for instance, presupposed the possibilities of plate glass casting. The renovations at Marly, Meudon, and elsewhere provided steady work to the Royal Plate Glass Company, which supported further technical innovation. Similarly, the quarrying, dressing, and transportation of marble qualified French artistic excellence and supplied the kingdom with resources that were previously imported from abroad. The noble associations attached to the royal chimneypiece contributed to its popularity in Parisian homes of elite status, where its utilitarian and sensorial functions later emerged as central concerns for architectural theory and practice. Commerce, Decoration, and the Sensorial Interior Given the forms and materials employed, the ‘cheminée à la royale’ carried meanings related to the politics of display and the crown’s manufacturing initiatives. When its design was placed into commercial print, however, its profile weighed next to nothing and could travel swiftly between Versailles and Paris. The circulation and diffusion of the new model across homes of varying social affiliation dovetailed with a distinctly sensorial approach to interior space planning and the emergence of a new decorative genre.46 In many ways, the proliferation of ornament in this manner, called the style rocaille or goût modern by contemporary critics, marked the eventual exhaustion of the heroic decorative mode of the past century, as well as the political economy that supported it.47 Paradoxically, it was the commercial popularity of the marble and mirror-topped chimneypiece (as circulated in prints by Lepautre, Bérain, among others) that prompted its architectural theorisation and prescription at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The dissemination of the royal fireplace also illustrated the importance of labour networks, given that architects typically maintained like partnerships with masons, woodworkers, and other craftsmen across royal and private commissions. Compare Lepautre’s illustration from Marly with the chimneypiece installed at Hardouin-Mansart’s Hôtel Le Bas Montargis (1704–7), located at the Place Vendôme and now on exhibition at the Louvre (Figs 6 and 10).48 At the home, Hardouin-Mansart and the royal sculptor and wood-carver Jules Degoullons replaced Lepautre’s squared mantle with a curved model of veined mauve, similar in hue to marbles at Versailles. The mirror is made of three large sheets of glass, and the textiles to the left and right illustrate the colour and richness implied only in outline by Lepautre's commercial print. Along the sides of the glazed over-mantle, bronze grotesques double as wall sconces, which provided a dappled reflection of the well-appointed interior.49 Fig. 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Jules Hardouin Mansart with Jules Degoullons et al., Interior Décor from the Hôtel Le Bas Montargis, 1704–7, Place Vendôme, Paris, marble, painted and gilt sculpted wood, and glass. Musée du Louvre, Paris (Photo: Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Olivier Ouadah/Art Resource). Fig. 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Jules Hardouin Mansart with Jules Degoullons et al., Interior Décor from the Hôtel Le Bas Montargis, 1704–7, Place Vendôme, Paris, marble, painted and gilt sculpted wood, and glass. Musée du Louvre, Paris (Photo: Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Olivier Ouadah/Art Resource). For the Premier Architecte, decoration and private enterprise conflicted with the crown’s mercantile policies. Given the closing of Mediterranean commercial transit as well as fears of inflation during the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), Louis XIV forbade the sale or purchase of marble outside royal commissions (and doing so carried a fine of 3,000 livres).50 The decree, effectuated by an Arrêt de Conseil in 1701, came on the heels of several efforts that attempted to moderate the private consumption of marble, including the reserving of certain quarries for royal use (the ones at Campan, for example) and artificially increasing marble’s price on the commodities market. Interestingly, the king’s order would only be enforced beginning in 1755, likely because Hardouin-Mansart, as the administrator tasked with its oversight, found the material particularly lucrative for his speculative endeavours. In this case, the architect built the home of his own accord, selling it shortly thereafter to his daughter and son-in-law, Claude Le Bas de Montargis, a wealthy financier and war treasurer to the king. In 1708, the couple flipped the property with a life annuity to the Marquise de Créqui, a well-established lady of the court.51 What began as decorative fantasy and a testament to state manufacturing became, by the early eighteenth century, the foremost object of elite Parisian taste. Hardouin-Mansart's speculative building was endemic of a broader architectural phenomenon for which architects and craftsmen of royal affiliation engaged the private market with unprecedented vigour. The reasons were both professional and financial, and involved perceived limitations at Versailles as well as the crown’s economic hardships following the Wars of the League of Augsburg (1688–97) and Spanish Succession. The kingdom’s debt burden spelled disaster for an economic system reliant on military glory and domestic manufacturing. Between 1685 and the end of the century, the budget at the Bâtiments du Roi dropped 87%, which generated a slowdown across the building trades.52 Particularly susceptible was the Royal Plate Glass Company at Saint-Gobain, given that its royal privileges stipulated the casting of only large sheets of plate glass, which were expensive to produce (hence, the importance of royal commissions) and vulnerable to breakage during shipment. These factors helped precipitate the company’s bankruptcy in September of 1702. In Paris, the increased cost for materials was mirrored by a depression in land value—itself a consequence of the city’s annexing, between 1701 and 1702, of the southwest suburb of Saint-Germain.53 This, along with a rise in private lending intended to assuage the recession, prompted architects to buy and develop property for sale or rent, trying their hand at new approaches to residential design.54 So dramatic were the novelties produced at the beginning of the eighteenth century that the architect Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond fully amended d’Aviler’s popular manual from 1691, revising the sections on interior space planning and decoration, including stairways, windows, woodwork, and fireplaces.55 ‘There was almost nothing of the former Fireplaces distinguishing them from one another’, the author complained. ‘Their casings were always squared & composed of the same mouldings.’ The new forms, however, were lighter and more gracious in effect: ‘We sometimes arch them in plan’, he wrote, and ‘the mixture of marble in different colours, & the gilt bronze ornaments that we apply, distinguishes the different parts and produces a great richness’.56 Le Blond attached three designs that varied depending on the function of the room, all from Lepautre’s commercial print shop (Fig. 11). He placed the most classical version on the right, whose rectilinear mantelpiece, sculptural detail, and Ionic pilasters offered an air of formality. The curvilinear model to the left was reserved for the bedroom. At the centre, Lepautre topped the mirror with a roundel, in vogue around 1700 (one sees a similar roundel in the decoration reflected in the over-mantle of the Hôtel Le Bas Montargis), which displayed a satyr at the onset of attack. In the text, he described how the mirrors amplified the size and brightness of a room. Apart from this, ‘one has the pleasure in glimpsing one’s reflection in them, those of ones who pass behind, & those who enter into an Apartment or leave from it’.57 Fig. 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Pierre Lepautre, Chimneypieces for an hôtel particulier from Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond’s reissue of Augustin-Charles d’Aviler’s Cours d’architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole, 1710, etching and engraving. The print shown here is taken from the 1720 re-edition. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg (Photo: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg). Fig. 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Pierre Lepautre, Chimneypieces for an hôtel particulier from Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond’s reissue of Augustin-Charles d’Aviler’s Cours d’architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole, 1710, etching and engraving. The print shown here is taken from the 1720 re-edition. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg (Photo: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg). Lepautre’s inclusion of a satyr preying on a nymph conveys the bodily dimension of interior décor at the turn of the eighteenth century. Fireplaces, mirrored consoles, and other furnishings worked in concert to condition one’s perception (and often misperception) of space when inside.58 In terms of distribution and decoration, architects at the time began carving smaller, more particularised rooms for private use and specifying fine and luxurious fabrics to line interior surfaces. To guide the body through space, critics like Le Blond advised that fireplaces be located on the wall opposite the flow of movement, which maximised their visibility (as well as reflected the many commodities inside) and provided an architectural anchor to a room when one entered a suite by enfilade. The more public spaces initiated one’s progression through the home, with only the closest of relations invited to the private quarters within. On the interior, therefore, one's spatial impression was constructed more by the sequential passage through each richly decorated room than by the tectonic realities of the floor plan.59 The moving and sensing body conditioned the perceived charms of the decorative ensemble, though the arrangement of furnishings frequently served to confuse. For example, the recommendation that fireplaces be balanced on the opposite wall by a mirrored console distorted one's visual field by refraction, unleashing a spatial delirium whereby one's position in a room determined the degree of illusion experienced.60 The unbound reflection of and back onto the interior thus initiated an architectural mise-en-abyme whose moment of signification remained perpetually deferred. These games are hallmarks of early eighteenth-century aesthetics, for which optical deception and surface ornamentation triumph over architecture’s ‘noble’ pursuits of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas.61 By virtue of its integration into the building’s construction, however, the chimneypiece transgressed singular decorative classification. Indeed, its structural function and duty to contain a fire rendered it one of the most necessary of a building’s amenities, as well as one of its most dangerous.62 The hearth, in other words, was the site where the perception of the interior met with questions of public safety. Instead of an object based on man’s divine form, referencing previous claims by Bernard and Savot, the reconceived fireplace functioned as a decorative amenity that conditioned the planning, perception, and misperception of the interior. These experiments in distribution and decoration had everything to do with the commercial exploits of architects and decorators building on the private market. Thus, the diffusion of the ‘cheminée à la royale’ among homes of varying social affiliation corresponded with the breakdown of the architectural model as celebrated at Versailles, where materials, decoration, and technology celebrated the power of the absolutist state.63 Yet, it was precisely its inclusion in new construction that inspired its theorisation and prescription by Le Blond, among others. Its commercial popularity (as well as the comforts and dangers associated with its use) similarly attracted interest at the Académie royale des sciences, where the object's forms and materials helped advance theories regarding the mechanics of fire and the science of sensation. Heating Machines and the Science of Sensation Above all else, the fireplace’s utility relied on its ability to heat a room without damaging the interior or harming the inhabitant. In this regard, the domestication of the flame was as much an ethical endeavour related to the comfort and safety of the occupant (as well as his or her neighbours) as it was a decorative opportunity and affirmation of wealth and rank.64 These concerns regarding safety and efficiency directly contributed to the fireplace's scientific theorisation in the early eighteenth century. For this, the curvilinear shapes and flat reflective surfaces of recent models were hypothesised for their ability to augment and redirect heat, meaning that attempts at utilitarian improvement relied on the forms and materials initially composed as ornamental embellishment. Instead of an object likened to the human body, the reconceived fireplace functioned as a luxurious machine to entice the senses. The hearth carried important symbolic as well as scientific meanings, especially given the dirtiness and dangers associated with fire. Mimi Hellman, for instance, has convincingly shown how firedogs and other decorative accessories at the hearth playfully domesticated the flame, setting in motion dialectics of creation and destruction tauntingly made manifest with each surface flicker.65 On the interior, the often-unruly flame was pierced with commercial and erotic associations, as illustrated in a provocative tableau by François Boucher (Fig. 12). Consumer goods fill the ladies’ toilette, lit by the hearth on the left. A seated woman spreads her legs in dressing, which makes space for a docile feline of overtly sexual reference. Tongs, pokers, and a flame-shaped firedog reinforce themes of commodification, carnality, and desire. The bellows and fan cast to the side suggest that she had been too hot—itself a condition that implied both sexual arousal and physical danger.66 Indeed, as Gaston Bachelard later remarked, fire and its effects related as much to male domination and control as female nourishment and renewal.67 Fig. 12. Open in new tabDownload slide François Boucher, La toilette, 1742, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 66.5 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (Photo: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala/Art Resource). Fig. 12. Open in new tabDownload slide François Boucher, La toilette, 1742, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 66.5 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (Photo: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala/Art Resource). Fire’s symbolic purchase relied on this simultaneous reference to creation and destruction.68 In its joining of oppositions (danger and comfort, male and female, etc.), the domesticated flame prompted speculation on topics ranging from human subjectivity to the scientific value of experience. René Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (1664), for instance, famously illustrated the manner by which a blaze incited bodily movement (Fig. 13).69 The fire, marked A, excited the foot’s internal particles, called corpuscles, marked B. This disturbance pulled an internal cord, cc, and sounded a bell within one’s brain, labelled F, thereby freeing one’s ‘animal spirits’ to register pain.70 These claims sought a mechanical explanation for the actions and reactions of the body, meaning that physical phenomena were explained in terms of matter and motion (and the form of this matter in motion). Fig. 13. Open in new tabDownload slide Mechanical explanation for involuntary bodily movement, using fire as an example, from René Descartes, L’homme de René Descartes, 1664, etching. *AC85 J2376 Zz664d, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Photo: Harvard University). Fig. 13. Open in new tabDownload slide Mechanical explanation for involuntary bodily movement, using fire as an example, from René Descartes, L’homme de René Descartes, 1664, etching. *AC85 J2376 Zz664d, Houghton Library, Harvard University (Photo: Harvard University). To the less scientifically inclined, smoke’s moody evanescence connoted no less than the flame’s magic, which transformed wood into cinder and water into air. Much of this bore the influence of a classical philosophical system that categorised the world into the four irreducible elements of earth, water, air, and fire (in many ways, Oppenord's reference to this system at the Hôtel de Pomponne attested to its enduring symbolic currency for the arts). How, some asked, might one element change in both form and material? By what means could the flame’s effects be employed to more productive ends? These ruminations on nature brought theological and technological concerns into direct relation and contributed to the development of the experimental sciences, which aimed to understand the composition of matter in more empirical terms—motivated as they often were by alchemic ambitions and allusions to the divine.71 That the theorising of fire, heat, and the human body relied on the productive confluence of the arts and sciences is absolutely crucial. In his treatise La Méchanique du feu (1713), the physician and lawyer Nicolas Gauger explained how the fireplace’s materials and composition could enhance heat efficiency. This, he proposed to the Académie royale des sciences, qualified its status as a machine, and in 1720, the institution included his invention into its approved records.72 He specified that the hearth’s interior be parabolic in plan—shown by his figure II—which reflected heat into the room (Fig. 14). The flame, marked f, emits warmth in straight lines, and a curvilinear metal casing ensured its proper redirection. He explained: Just as illuminated bodies scatter rays of light in all directions, fire too spreads & pushes out in rays of heat on all sides … these rays are straight when they come directly & immediately from the flame, or reflected when they are diverted at the meeting of another body that returns them; and in their reflection, they must follow the same laws as rays of light, that is to say, their angle of incidence is equal to their angle of reflection.73 Fig. 14. Open in new tabDownload slide Nicolas Gauger, Plan (left, figs. I and II) and section (right, fig. III) of a fireplace, with f designating the flame, La méchanique du feu, 1713, etching and engraving. Rare Books, 714411, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Photo: The Huntington Library). Fig. 14. Open in new tabDownload slide Nicolas Gauger, Plan (left, figs. I and II) and section (right, fig. III) of a fireplace, with f designating the flame, La méchanique du feu, 1713, etching and engraving. Rare Books, 714411, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Photo: The Huntington Library). Gauger’s claims aligned heat transmission with the principles of light, thereby engaging period debates on visual reflection and refraction as well as the scientific nature of colour.74 He asserted that this likewise functioned in section, which he illustrated in his Figure 3, and lauded those mantelpieces whose rounded openings minimally interrupted heat’s three-dimensional release. Practical hardships motivated the fireplace’s scientific theorisation. The winter of 1708–9 claimed 25,000 Parisian lives and triggered a famine, due to which the cost of bread increased tenfold. Throughout the harshest of months, Gauger assured, his home remained warm—a comfort he extended to his readers should they adopt his model. By his analysis, fireplaces emitted warmth in three ways: directly, as illustrated by the line fd in Figure 2; indirectly, as illustrated by the refracted line flp; and by conduction, whereby heat transferred across a secondary body before releasing into space.75 Conventional models worked by the laws of direct heating, and recent creations added the advantages of the indirect method, given their curved forms and reflective surfaces. His fireplace incorporated the benefits of all three. Behind the hearth, he integrated vents that drew cool air from outside, arguing that the interior’s lower atmospheric pressure guaranteed a continuous draft (Fig. 15). The cast-iron plate heated the ductwork’s air, which rose when warm and exited by ducts to colder rooms elsewhere. Fig. 15. Open in new tabDownload slide Nicolas Gauger, Interior of a new fireplace, La méchanique du feu, 1713, etching and engraving. Rare Books, 714411, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Photo: The Huntington Library). Fig. 15. Open in new tabDownload slide Nicolas Gauger, Interior of a new fireplace, La méchanique du feu, 1713, etching and engraving. Rare Books, 714411, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (Photo: The Huntington Library). Gauger’s invention saw limited commercial success, given its cost and complexity of construction, though it did inspire Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Fireplace of 1741. As with optics, or the study of light, the physics of hot and cold air presented an empirical challenge, for temperature could only be understood through its effects, that is, by its properties felt in sensation. Gauger addressed this problem head on, having proposed in 1710 a suite of new thermometers and barometers to gauge heat and atmospheric pressure. In a short text on the subject, he claimed the reciprocal importance of drawing and mathematics, which helped abstract theory find practical consequence.76 Mechanics, in other words, relied equally on artistic and scientific invention. It deserves mentioning that Gauger’s assertion that warmth, like light, emanated outwards in straight lines implied the presence of a vacuum, or a space devoid of matter, within which particles could move uninterrupted. This ran counter to scientific claims introduced by Aristotle and affirmed by Descartes, among others, which posited that all celestial and terrestrial space was composed of tiny corpuscles and, consequently, nothing within this plenum could travel in a direct path. To this, the French inventor consciously borrowed from Sir Isaac Newton. In 1713, the same year as Gauger’s treatise, the mathematician Roger Cotes published an expanded second edition of Newton’s Principia, amending it with sections on planetary motion and a rebuttal to Cartesian cosmology, which had previously explained gravity as the downward pressure exerted from the heavens’ small and rapidly moving particles.77 He asserted the existence of a vacuum, which enabled the sun’s light to travel in straight lines, and credited gravity to the mutual attraction between bodies. Gauger’s study brought the fireplace’s formal and technical concerns into dialogue with contemporary scientific discourse. It bears reminding that architects and decorators laid the groundwork for his philosophical conjectures. By embedding the flue into the structure of the wall, they diminished the chimneypiece’s monumentality and, by topping the composition with a mirrored over-mantle, introduced an aesthetic system that was more visual and sensorial than spatial and tectonic. This was a radically new architecture of the senses, which had philosophical corollaries in the writings of John Locke and, later, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. All this lent greater importance to human perception and presumed the scientific validity of experience and experimentation. To this, the physicist Jacques Rohault built on and helped popularise Descartes’s earlier reflections on bodily movement when explaining the mechanics of hot and cold air. In his Traité de physique of 1671, for example, he asserted that, ‘Heat consists in the different and violent Agitation of the insensible Parts of Bodies’, while, ‘Cold, which is common to all hard Bodies, cannot consist in any Thing but what is common to them, namely, in the Rest of their Particles’.78 Warmth and coolness, in other words, were not things in and of themselves but instead properties deriving from the disturbance within a material’s constituent elements. Fire’s combustion excited air’s corpuscles, which produced a warming (then burning) sensation when transferred into the skin, consequently uniting body and soul.79 Its philosophical importance relied on the violence of this activity, acknowledging that the burns from an uncontrollable flame could end one’s life. Pain and pleasure, in other words, were two sides of the same coin. Materials responded differently to such agitation. Whereas the wax of a candle melted with added heat, a clay pot hardened. This, Rohault explained, resulted from differences in their internal structure.80 Wax consisted of liquid particles trapped by heavier solid ones. Heat destabilised the composition, unlocking the fluid substance that ran from a burning wick. Clay, on the other hand, was composed of earth and water of equal number and distribution. Fire evaporated the liquid parts, thereby leaving a dried and increasingly brittle material. In the early eighteenth century, the scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur mobilised these hypotheses when rehabilitating France’s metallurgical industries, which were also weakened from the crown’s economic troubles. In a lengthy treatise on the subject, he wrote of how the fractured end of a wrought iron bar affirmed the material’s granular composition.81 When heated by a charcoal-fuelled flame, he explained, the smoke’s sulphur and carbon filled the empty cavities, which increased stiffness. That he ended his dissertation with a discussion on the ornamental shapes thus newly made possible confirmed the artistic interests underlying much of the mechanical sciences (Fig. 16). Nature, physics, and visual fantasy, in other words, intersected at the level of form. Fig. 16. Open in new tabDownload slide Ornamental forms in cast iron from René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, L’art de convertir le fer forgé en acier et l'art d’adoucir le fer fondu, ou de faire des ouvrages de fer fondu aussi finis que de fer forgé, 1722, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). Fig. 16. Open in new tabDownload slide Ornamental forms in cast iron from René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, L’art de convertir le fer forgé en acier et l'art d’adoucir le fer fondu, ou de faire des ouvrages de fer fondu aussi finis que de fer forgé, 1722, etching and engraving. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (Photo: Getty Research Institute). The process of firing, melting, moulding, and cooling of iron resulted in a hardness and conductivity ideally suited for the hearth’s interior backing. Coldness, on the other hand, stemmed from materials made of larger and more tightly packed particles, whose impenetrability helped moderate the agitation of nearby heat. Rohault considered marble exemplary in this regard, claiming that its millennia of compaction helped it refuse external corrupting forces. Its density, he wrote, explained why the air above a polished marble counter felt cooler than elsewhere.82 Regarding its insulating capacity, Gauger applauded those mantelpieces currently in vogue, claiming that their round edges and billowing extrusions eliminated corners where smoke typically escaped. A bent stack, controllable flue, and chimney baffles minimised outside influences and protected the home from fire’s potential ravages. The scientist, in other words, joined the forms of period decoration with the logic of the mechanical sciences to create a machine that ensured safety and comfort on technological grounds. For Gauger, the productive abilities of art and science coalesced at the moment of architectural invention—when contending with natural phenomena demanded human intervention and formal response. In his influential dictionary of 1690, Antoine Furetière claimed this intersection as the province of the machine, which relied on the ‘Arts of Mechanics’ and whose proficiency and conscription overcame the contingencies of the materials employed: One gives the name machine to all that which has movement only by the artifice of man, as the scenery of theatre: tanks, clouds, ships, and that which helps man make things which are above his strength … One properly calls a machine that which consists more in art & in invention than in the strength & stability of the material.83 Furetières’s words bring art, science, spectacle, and warfare into conceptual alignment, highlighting the confluence of politics and pleasure. In the case of the fireplace, invention split along two axes, with its generation and diffusion speaking to the political and economic exploits of architects and decorators, and its mechanical and sensorial theorisation appearing only after the creative act. Materials such as glass, marble, and iron helped mediate the physics of hot and cold air. When brought into composition, they exceeded their material limitations, mobilised the flame's effects, and granted architecture control over the senses. Whether they were successful or not, these efforts to reconceive the fireplace marked out new territory for architecture’s engagement with human sensation—an area for which classical theory offered limited guidance. Throughout its evolution, the body played a vital role in design—first, by way of analogy and, later, in the theorisation of heat and comfort. What began as a monument to hearth and home thus found itself transformed into a luxurious machine-like furnishing to entice the senses. That this began as political spectacle and was only later disseminated by speculative ventures complicates any claims toward intentionality, or the causal links between technological function and decorative form. If drawings and prints by Oppenord and Lepautre helped propel the fantasies of the style rocaille, it deserves reminding that these efforts sought to stimulate feeling directly, igniting a mechanics of meaning that functioned at the level of the body and intersected with the development of building practice, decoration, and natural philosophy at the turn of the eighteenth century. This article began as talks delivered at Columbia University and the University of Lausanne. Appreciation goes to Erika Naginski and Antoine Picon for advice from beginning to end, as well as to Barry Bergdoll, Matthieu Lett, Carl Magnusson, Léonie Marquaille, and the audience members at Columbia and Lausanne for their feedback. I would also like to thank Meredith Martin, Vanessa Schwartz, Katie Scott, Aaron Wile, and the two anonymous readers who offered helpful critique. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Footnotes 1 " On the Hôtel de Pomponne, see Alden R. Gordon, The House and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny (Los Angeles: Provenance Index of the Getty Research Institute, 2003), pp. 85–6. 2 " On Oppenord’s work at the Palais Royal, see Jean-François Bédard, ‘Political Renewal and Architectural Revival during the French Regency: Oppenord’s Palais Royal’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 68, no. 1, March 2009, pp. 30–51. 3 " On the ‘cheminée à la royale’ within the context of the Rococo, see Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1943), pp. 59–111. 4 " See ‘cheminée’ in Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècles (Paris: B. Bance, 1854–68), vol. 3, pp. 195–209. 5 " Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales: naissance de la consommation dans les sociétés traditionnelles (XVIIe–XIXe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 121–49, esp. p. 145. 6 " In this regard, the magnificent chimneypieces by Giovanni Battista Piranesi functioned on the levels of symbolism and history (as opposed to materials and technology, explicitly). See Piranesi, Diverse maniere d’adornare i cammini ed ogni altra parte degli edifizi (Rome: Nella Stamperia di Generoso Slomoni, 1769). On the book, see Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Piranesi’s Architectural Creed’, Studies in the Italian Baroque (Boulder: Westview Press, 1975), pp. 235–46, esp. pp. 245–6. 7 " In this case, the distinction between interior and exterior decoration was one of scale, whereby the chimneypiece functioned as akin to a dormer or other embellishment on the facade. For his decorative options, see Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Second livre d'architecture (Paris: A. Wechel, 1561), pp. 1–21. 8 " Antoine Pierretz, Divers desseins de Cheminées à la Royalle (Paris: Pierre Mariette, 1647). 9 " Jean Barbet, Livre d’architecture d’Autels et de Cheminées (Paris: Tavernier, 1633). On the book, see Peter Fuhring, ‘Jean Barbet’s “Livre d’Architecture, d’Autels et de Cheminées”: drawing and design in seventeenth-century France’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 145, no. 1203, June 2003, pp. 421–30. 10 " Pierre Le Muet, Manière de bien bastir pour toutes sortes de personnes (Paris: Chez Melchior, Paris, 1623), pp. 3–4 and 22. 11 " Cabinets and wardrobes were especially susceptible to fuming, given that their size rarely provided sufficient air to nourish the flame (in these cases, he recommended having an opened door or window to aid initial airing). Louis Savot, Architecture françoise des bastimens particuliers (Paris: Chez Sébastien Cramoisy, 1624), pp. 131–43. 12 " Jean Bernard, Sauvegarde pour ceux qui craignent la fumée (Dijon: Claude Guyot, 1621), f. 71. 13 " François Blondel, Cours d’architecture (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1683), vol. 4, p. 566: ‘Au sujet des Cheminées l’on peut considerer leur forme, leur situation, leur disposition, leur mesures & leurs ornemens. Car bien qu’elles ayent par tout un même usage qui est d’échauffer els lieux ou ells font, sans que l’on y soit incommodé de la fumée; Elles font pourtant tres-differentes en leur forme & en leurs autres parties essentielles selon la differences des Païs.’ 14 " This measured at nine pouces in Ancien régime standards. See Blondel, Cours, p. 569. 15 " On the architectural consequences of this regulation, see Jean-François Cabestan, La conquête du plain-pied: L’immeuble à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 2004), pp. 96–110. 16 " The ordinance mandated a flue of four pieds. See Nicolas Delamare, Traité de la Police (Paris: Chez Jean et Pierre Cot, 1705–38), vol. 4, pp. 138–42. 17 " Michel de Frémin, Mémoires critiques d’architecture (Paris: Chez Charles Saugrain, 1702), pp. 214–82. On Frémin’s importance for architectural theory, see Dorothea Nyberg, ‘The “Mémoires critiques d’architecture” by Michel de Frémin’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 22, no. 4, December 1963, pp. 217–24. 18 " Joan DeJean, The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern House Began (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 93–101, esp. pp. 93–4. 19 " On this, see Stéphane Castelluccio, L'éclairage, le chauffage et l'eau aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2016), pp. 109–67. 20 " On the kitchen and its precarious status for eighteenth-century architectural theory, see Sean Takats, The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 41–65. 21 " Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Cours d’architecture qui comprend les ordres de Vignole (Paris: Chez Nicolas Langlois, 1691), vol. 1, pp. 158–71, esp. 160: ‘Autrefois les Cheminées dans les Bastimens particuliers étoient adossées les unes devant les autres, mais comme elles chargeoient les Planchers, & avançoient trop dans les Chambres on a corrigé ce defaut, en les rangeant le long du mur, & en devoyant les Tuyaux.’ 22 " This correlated to period understandings of structure, for which the symbolism of strength no longer demanded a massive or rusticated appearance of stability. The Louvre Colonnade is a notable example of this understanding of structure. See Antoine Picon, Architectes et ingéneieurs au siècle des Lumières (Marseille: Parenthèses, 1988), pp. 133–68. 23 " On architectural appropriateness, or convenance, see Werner Szambien, Symétrie, goût, caractère: Théorie et terminologie de l’architecture à l’âge classique, 1550–1800 (Paris: Picard, 1986), pp. 167–73. 24 " This simultaneous decorative and structural function resulted in the fireplace’s inconsistent assessment in period texts on construction. Pierre Bullet placed it among the legers ouvrages, or superficial works in building. Given the concerns associated with fire safety, wrote Antoine Desgodets, its responsibility nevertheless remained the legal charge of the mason. See Pierre Bullet, Architecture pratique (Paris: Chez Estienne Michallet, 1691), pp. 52–63 and Antoine Desgodets, Les loix des bâtiments, ed. Martin Goupy (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1748), pp. 96–106. 25 " Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin have shown how eighteenth-century patrons actively employed decoration as a tool of social performance, which marked the interior as the site where the tensions of rank, kinship, and gender were played out and often manipulated. See Baxter and Martin (eds), Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010). 26 " Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Space in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 81–117. 27 " Pierre Lepautre, Livre de cheminées executes à Marly sur les desseins de Monsr. Mansant (Paris: Chez Daigremont, 1699). On its creation, see Fiske Kimball, ‘The Development of the “cheminée à la royale’”, Metropolitan Museum Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, September 1936, pp. 259–80 and Alastair Laing, ‘Die Entwicklung des “Cheminée à la française” und seiner Dekoration’ in Hans Ottemeyer and Peter Pröschel (eds), Vergoldete Bronzen: Die Bronzearbeiten des Spätbarock und Klassizismus (München: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 443–58. 28 " On Hardouin-Mansart’s role at the Bâtiments du Roi, see Claude Mignot, ‘Mansart et “l’agence des Bâtiments du roi”’ in Alexandre Gady (ed.), Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 1646–1708 (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2010), pp. 45–58. 29 " On Marly, see Vincent Maroteaux (ed.), Marly: l’autre palais du soleil (Paris: Vögele, 2002). 30 " The king tasked Hardouin-Mansart with the renovation of the central salon on 25 June 1699. 31 " See Arch. nat., O1 1474 (31 janvier 1699). 32 " Arch. nat., O1 1474 (27 avril 1699), fol. 29. 33 " Christophe Bourel Le Guilloux, ‘Meudon, Travaux aux Châteaux Vieux et Neuf’ in Gady (ed.), Jules Hardouin-Mansart, pp. 364–73. On the chimneypieces designed for the château, see Arch. nat., O1 1521, 17 janvier 1699. 34 " There were known tensions between Bérain and Hardouin-Mansart, and it is possible that Bérain’s dedication was meant to gain favour with the king’s preferred architect. For the print and other ornaments, see Bérain, Ornemens inventez par Jean Bérain (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1700). 35 " On the Royal Plate Glass Company, see Warren Scoville, ‘State Policy and the French Glass Industry, 1640–1789’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 56, no. 3, May 1942, pp. 430–55. The construction of Versailles served as a catalyst for French manufacturing—a phenomenon whose influence, wrote Frédéric Tiberghien, rivalled the building of the cathedrals during the medieval period. See Tiberghien, Versailles, le chantier de Louis XIV, 1662–1715 (Paris: Perrin, 2002), pp. 180–227. 36 " Meredith Martin, ‘Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship’, Art History, vol. 38, no. 4, September 2015, pp. 652–67. 37 " On the display of mirrors, tapestries, and other manufactured goods in eighteenth-century interiors, see Scott, The Rococo Interior, pp. 31–43. 38 " Bernard Perrot invented the technique in 1687. Louis XIV nevertheless granted Abraham Thévart exclusive rights to glass casting after 1688. His furnace, first established in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was moved to Saint-Gobain in 1692. See Scoville, ‘Technology and the French Glass Industry, 1640–1740’, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 1, no. 2, November 1941, pp. 153–67, esp. pp. 156–8. 39 " Scoville, ‘Large-Scale Production in the French Plate-Glass Industry, 1665–1789’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 50, no. 5, October 1942, pp. 669–98, esp. p. 672. 40 " The kingdom also established trade contracts with Genovese merchants sympathetic to the Bourbon crown. See Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, ‘L’importation du marbre de Carrare à la cour de Louis XIV: Rivalités des marchands et échecs des companies’ in Pascal Julien (ed.), Marbres de rois (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2013), pp. 123–50. On marble extraction in France during the reign of Louis XIV, see Pascal Julien, Marbres: de carrière en palais (Marseille: Le bec en l’air, 2006), pp. 91–101. 41 " For many seventeenth-century eyes, marble’s colourful vibrancy and fossiliferous content evoked thoughts of the divine and time immemorial. On the use of coloured marble at Versailles, see Julien, ‘Marbres couronnées: Couleurs de Versailles et carrières du royaume’ in Julien (ed.), Marbres de rois, pp. 13–29. 42 " The project’s size and the difficulty of the terrain set the Canal du Midi apart from its Italian and Dutch counterparts. The fact that it traversed Roman Gaul further qualified the association between Ancient Rome and modern France. See Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 60–90. 43 " André Félibien, Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, et des autre art qui en dependent (Paris: Chez Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1676), p. 59: ‘Depuis que Monsieur Colbert est Surintendant des Bastimens, l’on a par ses soins & sous ses ordres, découvert en France, principalement du costé des Pyrenées, des Marbres de differentes couleurs. Il y a apparence qu’autrefois les Romains en ont tire de ces quartiers-là, parce qu’on voit dans les Carrières, qu’il en est sorti beaucoup qui ne se trouvent point en France, ainsi ils doivent avoir esté transportez ailleurs.’ 44 " Claude Perrault, Recueil de plusieurs machines de nouvelle invention (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1700) and Machines et inventions approuvées par l’Académie royale des Sciences, 7 vols. (Paris: Chez Gabriel Martin, 1735–77). 45 " ‘Machine pour scier le marbre, inventée par M. de Fonsjean’ in Machines et inventions, vol. 1, pp. 195–8. 46 " This ethos of circulation, argued Sarah Coffin, underwrote the logic of the Rococo decorative style, for which motifs frequently migrated between snuffboxes, furniture, painting, sculpture, and architecture. See Coffin, ‘The Dissemination of the Style through Migrating Designers, Craftsmen, and Objects in the Eighteenth Century’ in Sarah D. Coffin et al. (eds), Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730–2008 (New York: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2008), pp. 102–35. 47 " Here, Oppenord’s employment by the Duke of Orléans, who served as Regent following the king’s death, could be seen as an attempt to rescript authority by means of architecture and décor. See Scott, The Rococo Interior, pp. 121–45 and 177–211. 48 " On the decoration of the hôtel particulier, see Frédéric Dassas, ‘Labris de l’hôtel Le Bas de Montargis’ in Jannic Durand et al. (eds), Décors, mobiliers et objets d’art du musée du Louvre: De Louis XIV à Marie Antoinette (Paris: Somology, 2014), pp. 112–13. 49 " On Degoullons and the Société pour les Bâtiments du Roi, see Bruno Pons, De Paris à Versailles: Les sculpteurs ornemanistes parisiens et l’art décoratif des bâtiments du roi (Strasbourg: Association des publications près les Universités de Strasbourg, 1986), pp. 63–84. 50 " See Julien, Marbres, p. 100. 51 " See ‘No 7. Hôtel Le Bas de Montargis. Hôtel de Créqui, Hôtel du général commandant la place de Paris’ in Thierry Sarmant and Luce Gaume (eds), La Place Vendôme: Art, pouvoir et fortune (Paris: Action artistique de la ville de Paris, 2002), p. 276. 52 " The budget plunged from 15 million livres in 1685 to 1.9 million livres by 1691—a rate at which it remained through the early eighteenth century. See Jules Guiffrey, Comptes des Bâtiments du roi sous le règne de Louis XIV (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1881–1901), vol. 2, pp. 575–99; vol. 3, pp. 512–6; and vol. 5, pp. 575–9. 53 " See Marcel Poëte, Formation et evolution de Paris (Paris: Librairie Félix Juven, 1910), pp. 145–8. 54 " On the credit market at the turn of the eighteenth century, see Philip T. Hoffman et al., Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 50–68. 55 " On Le Blond, see Olga Medvedkova, Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond, Architecte, 1679–1719, De Paris à Saint-Pétersbourg (Paris: Alain Baudry et Cie, 2007). 56 " Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond (ed.) in d’Aviler, Cours d’architecture qui comprend les ordres de Vignole (Paris: Chez Jean Mariette, 1710), vol. 1, pp. 171*1–2: ‘Il n’y avoit Presque rien de particulier dans les anciennes Cheminées qui les distiguât les unes des autres. Leurs Chambranles étoient toûjours quarrez, & composez des mêmes moulures … On les cintre quelquefois sur leurs plans … Le mélange des marbres de couleurs differrentes, & des ornemens de bronze doré qu’on y applique, detachment ces differrentes parties, & y produisent beaucoup de richesse.’ 57 " Le Blond in d’Aviler, Cours (1710), vol. 1, p. 171*2: ‘on a le plaisir en s’y mirant d’appercevoir, sans se détourner, ce qui se passé derrière soy, & ceux qui entrent dans l’Appartement, ou qui en sortent.’ 58 " The emphasis on interior commodities explains the popularity of books like Jean Mariette’s Architecture à la mode, which featured only five floor plans but 170 sheets of contemporary decorations, including an impressive suite of fireplaces by Lepautre, Pierre Bullet, and Jean-Baptiste Leroux. See Jean Mariette, Architecture à la mode (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1738). 59 " Katie Scott termed this the sequential as opposed to spatial logic of the early eighteenth-century Parisian mansion. See Scott, The Rococo Interior, p. 107. 60 " Peter Collins compared this visual and spatial delirium to a sense of parallax. See Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (London: Faber and Farber, 1965), p. 27. 61 " On this, see Marion Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1982), pp. 47–61. 62 " In this regard, Michel de Frémin's earlier invention of a so-called ‘smokeless’ fireplace aimed to address the potential hazards from faulty construction by developers intent on cutting corners in construction. See n. 17. 63 " Ironically, it was the expansion of private construction in the early eighteenth century that helped support the Royal Plate Glass Company after its bankruptcy and restructuring. During the Regency, sales in the company were nearly three times greater than in previous years. See Scoville, ‘Large-Scale Production in the French Plate-Glass Industry, 1665–1789’, note 29 and Table 1. 64 " The fact that Stanisław Leszczyński, the Polish king and father-in-law to Louis XV, died from severe burns (acquired from his nightgown catching fire while next to an active hearth) reveals the very real dangers plaguing the chimneypiece's maintenance well into the eighteenth century. 65 " Mimi Hellman, ‘The Decorated Flame: Firedogs and the Tensions of the Hearth’ in Martina Droth and Penelope Curtis (eds), Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009), pp. 176–85. 66 " On fire and sexual arousal, see Mary Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 130–5. 67 " Gaston Bachelard, La psychoanalyse du feu (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992), pp. 79–104. 68 " The element’s symbolic complexity is expressed in a tapestry designed by Charles Le Brun. It depicts fire as a labouring Vulcan, joined above by Jupiter and Venus. The inclusion of Vulcan's father and wife, wrote André Félibien in a commentary on the tapestry, illustrated the tensions between creation and destruction, peace and war, and love and danger. See Félibien, Tapisseries du roy ou sont representez les quatres elemens et les quatre saisons (Paris: Imprimerie roiale, 1670). 69 " René Descartes, L’homme de René Descartes (Paris: Chez Charles Angot, 1664), pp. 27–8. 70 " It is not insignificant that the philosopher likened these ‘animal spirits’ to a fire burning in one’s heart, which was the physical cause of all bodily movement. See Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Paris: Chez Louys Elzevier, 1649), pp. 11–12. 71 " On this, see William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 238–89. 72 " See ‘Nouvelles constructions de cheminées inventées par M. Gauger’ in Machines et inventions, vol. 4, pp. 11–14. 73 " Nicolas Gauger, La méchanique du feu (Paris: Chez Jacques Estienne, 1713), 3–4: ‘Comme les corps lumineux répandent à la ronde plusieurs rayons de lumière, le feu répand & pousse aussi de tous côtés plusieurs rayons de chaleur … Ces rayons font ou directs, quand ils viennent directement & immediatement du feu, ou réflechis, quand ils font détournés à la rencontre de quelque autre corps qui les renvoie ; & en se réflechissant ils doivent suivre les mêmes loix que les rayons de lumiere, c’est-à-dire que leur angle d’incidence, est égal à leur angle de réflexion.’ Emphasis added. 74 " Gauger, Lettres de M. Gauger … sur la différente réfrangibilité des rayons de la lumière et l'immutabilité de leurs couleurs (Paris: Simart, 1728). On eighteenth-century understandings of light and shadow, see Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 76–117. 75 " Gauger, La méchanique du feu, pp. 5–6. 76 " Gauger, Résolution du problème proposé dans le Journal de Trévoux du mois de mars dernier pour la construction de nouveaux thermomètres et de nouveaux baromètres (Paris: J. Quillau, 1710), p. 9. 77 " See the ‘Scholium Generale’ in Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Editio Secunda Auctior et Emendation, ed. Roger Cotes (Cambridge: University Press, 1713), pp. 481–4. 78 " Jacques Rohault, Rohault’s System of Natural Philosophy, Illustrated with Dr. Samuel Clarke’s Notes taken mostly of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, trans. John Clarke (London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1735), vol. 1, pp. 155–6 and 165. Emphasis added. 79 " Descartes explained that the soul itself did not give heat and movement to the body, contrary to common assumption. See Descartes, Les passions de l’âme, pp. 5–6. 80 " Rohault, Natural Philosophy, p. 159. 81 " René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, L’Art de convertir le fer forgé en acier et l’art d’adoucir le fer fondu, ou de faire des ouvrages de fer fondu aussi finis que le fer forgé (Paris: Chez Michel Brunet, 1722). 82 " Rohault, Natural Philosophy, p. 166. 83 " See ‘machine’ in Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (The Hague: Chez Arnout & Reinier Leers, 1690), vol. 2: ‘On donne le nom de machine en general à tout ce qui n’a de mouvement que par l’artifice des hommes, comme les scènes et les theatres mobiles, les chars, les nues, les vaisseux, et aussi ce qui sert aux homes pour faire des choses qui sont au-dessus de leurs forces … Il Faut remarquer qu’on appellee proprement machine, ce qui consiste plus en art & en invention que dans la force & la solidité de la matiere.’ Emphasis added. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved
TI - Fire, Décor, and Heating Machines
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcx036
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/fire-d-cor-and-heating-machines-7OPP8oaHEQ
SP - 371
VL - 40
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -