Dr Robert Wellington, Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, is co-editor of a new book on the Château of Versailles that has just been released as an eBook by Bloomsbury Academic. The essays in this volume were first presented at the Australian National Gallery at a conference held alongside the 2016/2017 blockbuster exhibition 'Versailles: Treasures from the Palace.'  This new book, titled The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives and Afterlives of the Domain, is edited by Dr Robert Wellington (ANU) and Professor Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and is now available as an eBook.

This new book shows that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement.

World expert on eighteenth-century art and culture, Professor Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), enthusiastically endorsed the book: 

“The refreshingly original and broad-ranging essays assembled in this volume eloquently demonstrate that Versailles was so much more than the magnificent palace of the Sun King. It was a domain, physical, cultural, artistic, political; an experience, and an idea, whose power, meanings, and effects still resonate today.” 

The Versailles Effect will be published in hard copy on January 28, 2021. The e-book is avaliable online via the Bloomsbury website.

Learn more about Dr Robert Wellington's research here.