WHEN EXPLORATIONS AND DISCOVERIES BRING MUCH MORE DYNAMIC CAPITALISM, NOBLES FIND NEW WAYS TO SHOW THEMSELVES SUPERIOR
(FROM ABOUT 1500)
One is to associate themselves with heroes of mythology and antiquity. Another is to stress their warrior valor.*
* Old Regime France separates the population into three legal categories, set up, it is said, by God: the clergy who pray (who on the top level are nobles, though not believers necessarily); commoners who work; and nobles, who fight (first with their own troops, later by leading those of the king).
They alone have the means to own horses, they alone perform heroically on the battlefield...
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A battle of the Spanish Reconquista, 1405 (painting a decade later) / zoom
The heroes are a king and a Crusader, backed by horsemen, who are nobles by definition. Helmets identify a line of foot soldiers, whose faces are not shown (as is the case for humble combattants generally until those on the hard-to-see frieze of the top of the Arc of Triumph).
They often wear armor for their portraits:
Portrait of a Young General by Anthony van Dyck, 1624
The shield-wielding combattant hovers over a château chimney, the dominant spot in a salon that was impossible to heat:
Claude Abron
The ideal this horseman expresses has no monetary goal:
 |
| Château d'Ecouen, museum publication |
Dueling appears at the same time. One throws away one's life as one does one's wealth, with panache:
Maurice Leloir in Richelieu by Thédore Cahu, 1903
Valor affirms nobles' superiority
over the prosaic, penny-pinching...
and ascendant middle class.
over the prosaic, penny-pinching...
and ascendant middle class.
* * *
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