André Félibien

André Félibien (May 1619 – 11 June 1695), sieur des Avaux et de Javercy, was a French chronicler of the arts and official court historian to Louis XIV of France.

His residence at Rome he turned to good account by diligent study of its ancient monuments, by examination of the literary treasures of its libraries, and by cultivating the acquaintance of men eminent in literature and in art, with whom he was brought into contact through his translation of Francesco Cardinal Barberini's Life of Pius V.[2] Among his friends was Nicolas Poussin, whose counsels were of great value to him, and under whose guidance he even attempted to paint[3] and whose biography Félibien wrote,[4] which remains "the most persuasive guide to the work, as to the life" of Poussin, as the biography's modern editor Claire Pace observed.

[6] In 1671 he was named secretary to the newly founded Académie royale d'architecture, where he gave lectures, and in 1673 he was appointed keeper of the cabinet of antiquities in the Palais Brion.

Sodoma's mural painting of The Women of Darius' Family before Alexander the Great (c. 1517) was an uncomfortably close source of inspiration for Charles Le Brun's celebrated version of 1660–1661, about which Félibien composed a panegyric entitled Les Reines de Perse aux pieds d'Alexandre (1663).

His personal character commanded the highest esteem, agreeing with the motto which he adopted - Bene facere et vera dicere, "Do well, and tell the truth".

André Félibien and Roger de Piles, author of Dialogue sur les coloris (Paris, 1673) "were and are the best-known writers on fine arts in seventeenth-century France".

Die intellektuelle Karriere des André Félibien im Frankreich von Louis XIV (Munich), 1997; it supplants the brief report in A. Fontaine, Les doctrines d'art en France (Paris) 1909:41ff.