Louis Cretey el le prophétisme vétérotestamentaire: à propos du "Jugement de Déborah" du musée du Louvre

• Autores: Jean-Christophe Stuccilli
• Localización: Revue de l'art, ISSN 0035-1326, Nº. 181, 2013, págs. 9-23
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • Louis Cretey (around 1630-after 1703) remains a mysterious painter even today. In order to shed light on his life and his career, there exist some brief contemporary evidence, and some rare archival mentions: all in all very little. After the recent focus of the catalogue of the Musée des Beaux Arts of Lyons, which revealed this situation, we would like to present an iconographical study of several misunderstood paintings. This examination aims at demostrating the intellectual ambition of the artist and of better defining his religious sensibility. We have been able to identify, in a chateau in the Loire valley, two paintings of prime importance that can, without difficulty, be associated with the "Jugement de Déborah" in the Louvre. They entered the national collections by dation in 2011 and are the starting point for our consideration. We propose to compare this group with the cycle that the painter realized for the chapter room of the royal Benedictine Monastère de Saint Pierre in Lyons, commissioned by the Abbess Antoinette de Chaulnes, the most important art patron in the city after the Villeroi family in the last third of the 17th century. Throughout the works studied, it would seem that during his stay in Lyons, Cretey devoted a special fascination to subjects of a prophetic character derived from Old Testament. This would seem to indicate that he moved in a literary environment, in particualr within the ecclesiastic circle in the city, but also within the Collège de Médecin of Lyons, heavily infused with the occult theories of Lazare Meyssonnier.