The balustrade of Louis XIV’s Chambre du Roi: the architecture of the ban

This paper examines the French monarch’s double nature in the 17th century in relation to the evolution of the sovereign’s architectural expressions.
Born from the superimposition of theological and political aspects, the double nature of the French king manifested in iconographic formulas, legal apparatuses, linguistic mechanisms, and architectural devices.
Among the latter, Louis XIV’s Chambre du Roi in Versailles and its gilded balustraded represented the threshold between the natural and the mystical bodies.
The paper detects the activation of the ban —embedded in Louis XIV’s balustrade— as a juridical and political device that governs and manifests the French king’s sovereign power, and it reveals its doubling.