The French national collection of ship models

The ship model is often consigned to the realm of static decor, an expression of nostalgia for a more technologically intelligible world that is long gone. Some ship models, however, act as manifestations of cultural identity, such as those discovered in graves in ancient Greece. In France, models have even played historically influential roles. From his inland vantage point in Paris, Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) looked to his army to affect the European power structure, constantly resisting his ministers' requests to strengthen his navy. It had been in decline for more than a decade when, in the 1670s, the statesman Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) decided on an unconventional approach to obtaining funds to renew it. Rather than request money for a force the king had never even seen, he had a miniature fleet constructed that could perform maneuvers before the king on the waterway at Versailles known as Petite Venise. (1)

To achieve his ends, Colbert capitalized on the almost irresistible appeal of objects in miniature. Entirely controllable, the miniature navy was divorced from the vast expenditures required for the design, construction, and maintenance of actual ships, and the thousands of seamen necessary to operate them.

Although Colbert's models were probably fairly rudimentary floating toys, other ship models with royal and imperial associations have been preserved as prized works of art, such as a silver model of the warship Ville de Paris (Pl. I) thought to have been presented to Napoleon I (1769-1821) around 1800, and an early eighteenth-century wooden model of a merchant ship (Pls. II, IIa) that is reputed to have been a gift to the young Louis XV (r. 1715-1774). These models and many others now in the Musee national de la Marine in Paris record achievements in vessel design, and also the artistic judgments made by those who created static miniatures to emulate dynamic archetypes. The miniature object, with its intrinsic allure, simultaneously invites inspection of and introspection into an unchanging and aeonian world.

Prior to adopting the technique of drawing the scaled-down lines of a ship on paper, shipwrights sometimes created models to convey information about how a ship was built. Knowledge accumulated through the construction of ship after ship was passed on orally between builders of a given region, who occasionally documented particularly advanced designs in the form of models. By the end of the seventeenth century in Europe, models had become popular devices for teaching the art of designing and building ships.

Since ships have unpredictable and sometime brief life spans, models are a practical way of recording their attributes. Some models were built as gifts for admirals and government ministers, while others simply documented the production of a shipyard. Some were planked up and rigged to portray the vessel as she looked in her completed state, while on others the hull or deck were left partially uncovered to expose the interior. Some were designed to float in the water, but most were meant for display on land. In some shipyards, the investment in models became enormous, with teams of specialized builders working for a year and more on a single example. (2) Today these models are often the only surviving representations of the work of naval architects and shipbuilders who were famous in their day Unfortunately most of the creators of these models remain anonymous. Those whose names survive are shipwrights who were likely to have overseen the construction of a model much as they did the building of an actual ship .

A model of the galley La Dauphine is a rare survival of a medieval style of warship that grew directly out of predecessors in the ancient world (Pls. V, VI). La Dauphine was one of the last galleys ever built--a galere extraordinaire, having twenty-nine banks of oars on each side and six rowing stations per oar. The standard galley or galere ordinaire, had twenty-six banks of oars per side, with five men at each oar. The galley with a single bank of oars was the standard vessel of war from ancient Greek times until the sixteenth century when lightweight ships powered only by oars, which could only patrol inshore areas, began to give way to larger hulled sailing warships that could venture farther afield and stay at sea for longer periods.

Commanded under an arcane ~' land-based system of generals and regiments, galleys were rowed by prisoners and slaves when in battle and when entering or leaving port, using sails if the winds allowed. Since the galley represented by the model in Plates V and VI, was built in 1736, her dominant offensive weapon was a cannon at her bow. Earlier generations of galleys had attacked by ramming their bows into enemy ships. Nonetheless, La Dauphine was lightly armed and her firepower would have been vastly inferior to that of even the smallest warships. (3)

Just as the model of La Dauphine represented waning naval and architectural traditions when it was built, a model named La Dauphin Royal portrayed the grand architecture of an empire then in ascendancy (see Pls. III, IV). The extension of French economic and political aspirations beyond the protected Mediterranean to Canada, the Caribbean, and the Far East was marked by the appearance of large square-rigged ships decorated with extravagant gilded carvings. The model called La Dauphin Royal was created in the dockyard of Rochefort for the personal training of the dauphin Louis (1729-1765), the son of Louis XV and father of Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792). In 1752, the architect Jacques Francois Blondel (1705-1774) saw the model on exhibit in the Salle de Marine in the Palais du Louvre in Paris. (4)