Mundus Muliebris

In this lucid essay, the erudite French essayist analyzes the work of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, one of the most brilliant and ignored painters of the last pre-revolutionary decades in France. A masterful portraitist "capable of combining faithful resemblance with impalpable idealization", Vigée Le Brun was the ally that Marie Antoinette chose to offer a human and worthy image of that mundus muliebris that she represented and that, supposedly, corrupted the prestige and the authority of monarchs by dint of effeminating them. A fascinating story that recreates with magnificent precision the virulent awakening of a political, moral and social misogyny that made Queen Marie Antoinette and her official portrait painter scapegoats.