Author Description

"What about power and its representations and, inversely, what about representation and its powers?" Louis Marin asks in his introduction to Le Portrait du roi, a book that centers on the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the role and function of his image as it proliferated in seventeenth-century France. Well-known and exciting scholar of that period and as a semiotician, Marin uses the methods of contemporary discourse theory to cut through the mystification that has characterized our knowledge of classical France. Writing about a time when theological notions and secular politics came together in the creation of the modern centralized state, he shows how the portrait of the king in all of its manifestations worked to accomplish the ruses of absolutism.