Costume design showing a man with right hand on his hip, dressed in a green, skirted garment with leaf-like shapes attached to the shoulders, waist, and neck, with matching green leggings and a green headpiece with white flowers

Daniel Rabel (1578 – 1637)
Costume design for Ballet des nymphes bocagères de la forest sacrée
Pen and ink and watercolor, 1627
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center

Costume design for Ballet des nymphes bocagères de la forest sacrée

Prominent 17th-century painter and engraver Daniel Rabel was King Louis XIII’s preferred designer for ballets de cours (court dances), as well as a prolific illustrator of botany who published the celebrated Theatrum Florae in 1622. The trend of ballet de cour began in the 1500s and reached its apotheosis with the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715). This costume design for “Spring” comes from Ballet des nymphes bocagères de la forest sacrée. It was composed by Antoine Boesset with a libretto by Francois Le Metel de Boisrobert and was originally performed in the Louvre in 1627 during Carnival by Queen Marie de Medici.

: Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing A…

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