A King’s Carpet: Louis XIV and the Savonnerie

Now on view at the Met Museum Exhibitions, *A King’s Carpet: Louis XIV and the Savonnerie* traces how a royal workshop helped turn tapestry-scale carpet making into a tool of statecraft in seventeenth-century France. The exhibition follows the Savonnerie manufactory’s designs, materials, and labor systems, and the way these objects moved between palace ceremony and diplomatic display. In New York, it lands as a study in how decorative arts shape museum narratives as much as painting and sculpture. One clear takeaway is how power can be woven into pattern and institutionalized through craft.