Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 31. (Budapest, 2017)
Zsuzsa MARGITTAL: La Fontaine’s Fables and Other Animal Tales in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts’ Collection
ZSUZSA MARGITTAI LA FONTAINE’S FABLES AND OTHER ANIMAL TALES IN THE BUDAPEST MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS’ COLLECTION Introduction The object of this study is to highlight a set of objects distributed throughout various collections in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, but which, because of iconographic aspects, could be dealt with as an independent thematic unit:1 works decorated with animal tale illustrations. This requires considering analogies to certain depictions and briefly exploring the traditions of animal tale illustrations. The techniques and materials used in portraying animal tales have no limits, with depictions appearing on furniture, textiles, ceramics, and in the most traditional form: books. The scenes are mostly drawn from Aesop’s fables and from La Fontaine’s adaptations, but we also find illustrations of nonmoralizing tales. The first part of my study examines depictions of fables, while the second part focuses on one particular nonmorality tale and the many ways it has been illustrated. La Fontaine fables on furniture upholstery ‘All the furniture was in tapestry, the subjects of the designs being taken from La Fontaine’s fables. Jeanne was delighted at recognizing a chair she had liked when she was quite a child, and which represented the history of the Fox and the Stork.’2 Furniture upholstery illustrating La Fontaine’s fables appeared not only in the home of Maupassant’s heroine Jeanne in his novel A Life. The history of textiles adorned with fable illustrations extends back to the Bayeux tapestry, which displays two scenes from ‘The Wolf and the Crane’ and three from ‘The Fox and the Crow’3 in its borders; the characters in these depictions serve as analogies to the figures of William and Harold, who appear in the main narrative.4 Fables were a popular theme in furniture upholstery from the 18th and 19th centuries, and thus in the woven works produced in Aubusson, Beauvais and in the Paris Manufacture des Gobelins. The scholarly literature notes that, as a rule, these upholstered pieces of furniture present specific types of scenes on their seats and backs, with the seats apparently considered a more appropriate location for depictions of animals or a tale rather than people. The 18th-century chairs in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts are clear examples of this: the backs are adorned with scenes inspired by Franşois Boucher, while the seats displayed images from the fables of La Fontaine.5 A similar thematic scheme can be seen in the 18th-century set of French seating furniture in the Frick Collection; here, even the cabinetmaker’s identity is known.6 Elsewhere, seats with animal fable depictions are accompanied by backrests 39
