The Museum of French Monuments 1795-1816: 'killing Art to Make History' 140943799X, 9781409437994

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 The first volume in two centuries on Alexandre Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments in Paris, this study presents a comprehensive picture of a seminal project of French Revolutionary cultural policy-one crucial to the development of the modern museum institution. The book offers a new critical perspective of the Museum’s importance and continuing relevance to the history of material culture and collecting, through juxtaposition with its main opponent, the respected connoisseur and theorist Quatremère de Quincy. This innovative approach highlights the cultural and intellectual context of the debate, situating it in the dilemmas of emerging modernity, the idea of nationhood, and changing attitudes to art and its histories. Open only from 1795 to 1816, the Museum of French Monuments was at once popular and controversial. The salvaged sculptures and architectural fragments that formed its collection presented the first chronological panorama of French art, which drew the public; it also drew the ire of critics, who saw the Museum as an offense against the monuments’ artistic integrity. Underlying this localized conflict were emerging ideas about the nature of art and its relationship to history, which still define our understanding of notions of heritage, monument, and the museum. Alexandra Stara is Reader in the History and Theory of Architecture at Kingston University, London, UK.

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Michael Yonan, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting provides a forum for the broad study of object acquisition and collecting practices in their global dimensions from 1700 to 1950. The series seeks to illuminate the intersections between material culture studies, art history, and the history of collecting. HMCC takes as its starting point the idea that objects both contributed to the formation of knowledge in the past and likewise contribute to our understanding of the past today. The human relationship to objects has proven a rich field of scholarly inquiry, with much recent scholarship either anthropological or sociological rather than art historical in perspective. Underpinning this series is the idea that the physical nature of objects contributes substantially to their social meanings, and therefore that the visual, tactile, and sensual dimensions of objects are critical to their interpretation. HMCC therefore seeks to bridge anthropology and art history, sociology and aesthetics. It encompasses the following areas of concern: 1. Material culture in its broadest dimension, including the high arts of painting and sculpture, the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, etc.), and everyday objects of all kinds. 2. Collecting practices, be they institutionalized activities associated with museums, governmental authorities, and religious entities, or collecting done by individuals and social groups. 3. The role of objects in defining self, community, and difference in an increasingly international and globalized world, with cross-cultural exchange and travel the central modes of object transfer. 4. Objects as constitutive of historical narratives, be they devised by historical figures seeking to understand their past or in the form of modern scholarly narratives. The series publishes interdisciplinary and comparative research on objects that addresses one or more of these perspectives and includes monographs, thematic studies, and edited volumes of essays.

The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816 ‘Killing art to make history’ Alexandra Stara

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Alexandra Stara 2013 Alexandra Stara has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Stara, Alexandra, 1967The Museum of French Monuments 1795-1816 : ‘killing art to make history’ / by Alexandra Stara. pages cm. -- (The histories of material culture and collecting, 1400-1952) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3799-4 (hardcover) 1. Musie des monuments frangais (1795-1816) 2. Lenoir, Alexandre, 1761-1839. 3. Quatremhre de Quincy, M. (Antoine-Chrysostome), 1755-1849--Aesthetics. 4. Cultural property--Protection--France--History. 5. Monuments-Conservation and restoration--France--History. I. Title. N2050.M7S73 2013 709.4’07444361--dc23 2013005986

ISBN 9781409437994 (hbk)

Contents

List of Illustrations   List of Abbreviations   Preface  

vii xi xiii

Introduction  

1

1

A History  

13

2

A Visit  

47

3

In Search of Order  

89

4

Opposition  

123

5

The Inevitability of the Museum  

147

Bibliography   163 Index179

v

List of Illustrations

the cemetery of Père Lachaise, Paris, author’s photo.

I.1  Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, Alexandre Lenoir, oil on canvas, 220×161cm, 1799, Château de Versailles © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

1.7  The tomb of Héloïse and Abélard, designed by Alexandre Lenoir, at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, Paris, author’s photo.

I.2  François Bonneville, Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, c. 1787, engraving.

2.1 Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, façade of the château d’Anet at the museum entrance, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1816), author’s collection.

1.1  Sketch of the convent of the PetitsAugustins, as seen from the rue de PetiteSeine, after an engraving by Père Lupin, c. 1650, author.

2.2  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, plan of the Museum of French Monuments, engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

1.2 Anonymous, Alexandre Lenoir opposing the destruction of the royal tombs at SaintDenis, pen, ink and wash on paper, 1793, Louvre, Paris © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

2.3 Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, introductory hall, first view, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

1.3 Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, façade of the château de Gaillon, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1816), author’s collection.

2.4 Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, introductory hall, second view, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

1.4  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, tomb of Héloïse and Abélard (Plate 38), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.5 J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, introductory hall (Plate 1), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

1.5  The entrance to the introductory hall of the Museum of Monuments, as it survives today, author’s photo. 1.6  The tombs of La Fontaine (left) and Molière, designed by Alexandre Lenoir, at

vii

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 2.6  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, tomb of Richelieu, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.15  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, fifteenthcentury hall entrance (Plate 21), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.7 J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, introductory hall (Plate 9), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.16  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, fifteenth-century hall, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.8  Jean-Lubin Vauzelle, The Great Hall of the Museum of French Monuments, showing the monument to Diane de Poitier in the foreground, oil on canvas, c. 1820, Musée Carnavalet, Paris © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

2.17  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, sixteenth-century hall, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.9  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, tomb of François I, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.18 J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, sixteenth-century hall (Plate 32), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.10  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, thirteenth-century hall, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.19  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, seventeenth-century hall, first view, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.11 J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, thirteenth-century hall (Plate 16), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.20  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, seventeenth-century hall, second view, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.12  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, cloister with entrance to fourteenth-century hall on the left (Plate 25), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821– 26), author’s collection.

2.21 J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, seventeenth-century hall (Plate 35, detail), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.13 J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, fourteenth-century hall (Plate 19), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.22  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, cloister (Plate 29), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

2.14  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, fourteenth-century hall, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.23  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, cloister (Plate 27), engraving, in Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1821–26), author’s collection.

viii

list of illustrations 2.24  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, cloister, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.27  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, tomb of Dagobert I, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.25  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, Elysium, first view, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.28  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, tomb of Héloïse and Abélard, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.26  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, Elysium, second view, engraving, in Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français (Paris 1816), author’s collection.

2.29  Charles-Marie Bouton, Folie de Charles VI, oil on canvas, 146×114cm, 1817, Musée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse © Hugo Maertens Bruges/Direction des musées de France.

ix

List of Abbreviations

AMMF AN EUI

Inventaire général des richesses d’art de la France, Archives du Musée des monuments français, 3 vols (Paris, 1883–97) Archives Nationales, Paris European University Institute

xi

Preface

My first encounter with Lenoir and his museum took place in the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, as an attempt to understand modernity through the practices of collecting and displaying. For those years, I owe a great debt to Dalibor Vesely and Peter Carl, who introduced me to the ideas that have defined my academic development, and to the people who have become treasured friends and colleagues. I took my fascination with the Museum of Monuments along to the Department of the History of Art, University of Oxford, where the invaluable guidance and unfailing encouragement of Paul Crowther helped me turn it into a doctoral thesis. Paul has supported me ever since, and I wish to offer him a very heartfelt thank you. The work that turned my early investigations into this book has been conducted under the auspices of Kingston University London, where I benefited both from financial and moral support, through the School of Architecture and Landscape, the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, and the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre. I also wish to thank a number of people who have helped shape my understanding of Lenoir’s museum and have supported this project in various ways: Dan Karlholm, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Dominique Poulot, Donald Preziosi, Richard Wrigley, and my dear friend Penelope Bouloukou; special thanks to the series’ editor Michael Yonan, and the whole team at Ashgate, for their faith and hard work. I am grateful to Torsten Schlicht for much, in this case for his help with images; hopefully the end product will live up to expectations. Without my mother Anthoula’s francophilia, which she instilled in me early on, this project would not have taken place; I cannot thank her enough. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my father, Gregory, whose poetic constructs are a lifelong inspiration: je le mets – thé, viens!.

xiii

Introduction

Revisiting the Petits-Augustins The first Museum of French Monuments in Paris, inaugurated in 1795, is a familiar name in the history of the institution, despite being permanently closed in 1816 with little trace of its original setting remaining, and having only one scholarly publication dedicated to it since.1 Nevertheless, from the later twentieth century onwards scholars have increasingly recognised it as a very significant project, with Andrew McClellan stating that ‘no account of the dawn of the museum age in France would be complete without it’, yet references to it remain brief and limited in scope.2 Another visit to this pioneering modern museum is long overdue, and this book proposes to conduct it. The Museum of Monuments opened to the public almost concurrently with the Louvre but remained in its shadow as its less prestigious, more populist counterpart. The creation of amateur antiquarian Alexandre Lenoir, it presented the first chronological panorama of French art through confiscated sculptures and architectural fragments, gathered in temporary depots during the Revolution. Unlike the Louvre, which displayed undisputed masterpieces of art, such as Classical statues and Renaissance paintings, the status of the Museum of Monuments was ambiguous and contested. The objects in its collection had been, until very recently, intrinsically linked to worship and commemoration, forming integral parts of buildings and other sites. Putting such symbols of the toppled Ancien Régime on public display was controversial enough during the Revolution; but from 1799 onwards, with the demise of radical politics, the existence of such a display caused even greater offence in some circles, being seen as a reminder of Revolutionary vandalism. For its critics across regimes, the ‘monuments’ in Lenoir’s museum always managed to evoke the wrong kind of memories, alluding to collective identities that the community was apparently trying to shake off. Nevertheless, the project was consistently popular with the general public and praised as pioneering by several notable figures of the arts and letters. It was a small number of committed opponents, most prominent among them the respected academician and influential theorist of art and architecture Quatremère de Quincy, who upheld that the Museum of Monuments was an aberration of the recent, troubled past and should be closed. They succeeded in doing so in 1816, via royal decree. Quatremère coined the phrase 1

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816

‘killing art to make history’ to sum up his objection to Lenoir’s museum. Underlying this apparently localised conflict were emerging ideas on the nature of art and its relationship to history, the concept of national heritage and the role of the museum, which still define our cultural understanding today.

I.1  Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, Alexandre Lenoir, 1799, Château de Versailles © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

2

introduction

Alexandre Lenoir, the museum’s creator, curator and most fervent supporter, was neither a scholar nor a substantial artist, but an amateur with a considerable sense of opportunism. He was born in 1762 in Paris, to a family of merchants, but raised in the Alsace countryside by a clergyman uncle. As a young man, he returned to the capital to study painting with the painter to the king, Gabriel-François Doyen. Interested in the arts at large, but without any formal studies outside his apprenticeship with Doyen, Lenoir remained in his master’s studio for fifteen years without notable success. In the mean time, he also wrote a theatrical play that was published in 1786, entitled Les amis du temps passé I.2  François Bonneville, Antoine Chrysostôme (‘The friends of times past’). In 1792, Quatremère de Quincy, 1787 he abandoned his career as an artist to take guardianship of the former convent of the Petits-Augustins on the left bank of Paris, turned into a depot for confiscated Ancien Régime artefacts by the Revolution, and transformed it into the Museum of French Monuments three years later.3 The project was neither erudite nor systematic. In addition to Lenoir’s own scholarly shortcomings, throughout its life the museum existed in the most tumultuous and unstable of political contexts, alongside dramatic cultural changes affecting the role of the past in the present and the significance of art in general.4 As such, and because of the nature of its exhibits, the museum itself was a project characterised by conflict and ambiguity, where much was determined by circumstance rather than careful planning. But this deep entanglement in the welter of its context is arguably why the Museum of Monuments was such a crucial and meaningful instance in the history of the institution. Between the often conflicting visions of the various individuals involved in its making – ministers, committees and, of course, Lenoir – and the different currents, ideologies and concerns of its environment, the museum emerged as the complex imprint of an entire cultural process. One could retrace in detail the history of the changing regimes of those two decades simply by reading the modifications in Lenoir’s various catalogue editions, or by observing the changes in the acquisition policy of its monuments. This is not, however, the aim of this book: such a mapping of the museum’s superficial inconsistencies would detract from the more significant investigation of its underlying coherence, interpreting it as a meaningful and consequential project, despite – or rather because of – its combination of scholarly shortcomings, irresolutions and conflicts. It will be argued that the unique fusion of circumstances from which the Museum of Monuments emerged rendered it one of the most eloquent manifestations of a 3

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816

paradigm shift, while, at the same time, allowing it to articulate an innovative response to the increasingly problematic relationship between culture and its history. The role of Quatremère de Quincy and his writings on art is an essential component in this enterprise. Alongside, and beyond, his opposition to Lenoir’s project, Quatremère engaged at length with the idea of the museum in general, which he saw mainly as problematic, in the context of his extensive writings on art and architecture. The book will propose that such an examination of Quatremère’s work shows that his misgivings about Lenoir’s project were largely circumstantial, as the latter was effectively a response to Quatremère’s own concerns. This approximation is doubly significant: on one hand, it sheds new light into Quatremère’s celebrated critique against the museum, and on the other, it asserts the Museum of Monuments as a founding moment in the invention of national heritage and the role of the museum in modernity. Revolution, Monument, Museum Neither the museum nor the monument were concepts new to the French Revolution. Several projects of making royal art collections accessible to the public, and thus reinscribing the legitimacy of the monarchy in Enlightenment terms, were conceived and executed in Europe in the decades before the Revolution. The Salons for new art held by the École des Beaux-Arts in the palace of the Louvre since the 1730s were a significant first step towards this, opening up royal premises to the general public in the name of artistic education. The idea soon extended to permanent collections, with the Luxembourg gallery of royal paintings opened to the public in 1750, nominally as a study space for artists to improve the quality of their work through exposure to masterpieces, but equally in the spirit of public cultivation. For this purpose, the paintings were hung in a ‘compare and contrast’ manner, resembling the Salon style of display. Emerging ideas about the development of styles and chronology began to influence the arrangement of publicly accessible collections, such as the imperial collection in Vienna, which was chronologically rearranged by Christian von Mechel in the 1780s. This practice, however, remained an exception, at least until the following century. Significantly, the idea of parts of the Louvre being permanently converted to a public museum was also considered from the 1750s onward. A host of proposals and counterproposals were commissioned under both Louis XV and XVI, in line with the Encyclopaedists’ dream of a comprehensive art institution for public instruction, though none were executed until after the Revolution.5 Similarly, conceiving of ancient artefacts as monuments – that is, as condensers of meaning through which the present could glean an understanding of the past so as to confirm a sense of collective identity – was rapidly developing since the first decades of the eighteenth century. Bernard de Montfaucon’s seminal L’Antiquité expliquée (‘Antiquity explained’), the first volume of which appeared in 1719, established the idea of monuments as concrete and retrievable records of the past – that is, as ‘historical’. He used the expression in the preface of his work, writing that not only sculpture and architecture but also costume, armour and even the different genres of painting could 4

introduction

be understood as ‘historic monuments’. His subsequent Monumens de la Monarchie Françoise (‘Monuments of the French Monarchy’, 1729–33) introduced this concept to royal sculptures and architecture of France, a seminal work for all subsequent studies of the topic and for the Revolutionary appropriation of the idea of the historic monument, including Lenoir’s museum.6 Despite their existing presence in cultural discourse, both monument and museum underwent deep and enduring changes during the French Revolution. In the context of the urge for a brave new world, they were emancipated from traditional hierarchies and meanings in order to become building blocks for the new national construct. It is thus that a museum of monuments became possible for the first time and, in fact, necessary. This transformation, however, was fraught with problems, as it came up against a fundamental paradox inherent in the Revolutionary vision of total regeneration: on one hand it implied a severing of the links with the past, since so much of the past had been dismissed as problematic; on the other, it demanded a certain historical continuity to escape arbitrariness, to legitimise its existence in the larger scheme of things, to prove itself a ‘historical necessity’ and, ultimately, to confirm the very identity of the French people as the collective it proposed to regenerate. In the domain of the arts, and specifically the inheritance from the immediate past, this ambiguity was at its most acute. The arts of France, from the first Merovingian kings until the Revolution, had been developing in a framework dominated by the monarchy and the Church, the two primary structures the Revolution challenged. So, broadly speaking, the entire artistic inheritance of the Revolution was suspect because it potentially carried references to ideals now proscribed. One of the first radical measures of the Revolutionary Assembly after the fall of the Bastille, on the famous date of 14 July 1789, was the nationalisation of Church property, decreed on 2 November of the same year, and the subsequent spoliation of the vast wealth of artefacts included therein. These were then either sold for profit to foreign collectors, or reconverted to primary material – for example, metal was melted down and used to make guns, the pages of books and manuscripts were used to make cartridges, and so on. However, this unqualified destruction could not have been sustained for long. The various manifestations of the new regime all agreed that a strong cultural policy was essential for forging the identity of the new state, and artefacts from the past had an important role to play – although in what guise exactly was unclear. So, on 13 October 1790, the Commission of Monuments was created: it consisting mainly of Parisian academics and men of letters, whose task was the careful assessment of the artistic riches of France, deciding for each case individually what was to be done – that is, whether the works in question were to be preserved in the name of public instruction and advancement of the arts and sciences, or disposed of in the name of the Revolutionary ideal. One of the very first actions of the Commission of Monuments was the creation of depots for the collection of all confiscated artefacts. The two largest in Paris were instituted at the Hôtel de Nesle and the convent of the PetitsAugustins respectively, the latter decreed on the 15 October. From then on, a perpetual war between pro-conservation and pro-destruction parties was to rage throughout the Revolutionary era, with endless discussions, motions and decrees.7 5

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816

The argument for conservation centred on two issues. First, it was deemed necessary to maintain artworks considered masterpieces in their field for the education of future artists and confirmation of the new regime’s support for the arts, in accordance with Enlightenment doctrines. This usually pertained to Renaissance paintings and Classical sculptures, and was the simplest category to deal with, not only because of their considerable antiquity, thus detachment from the affairs of the recent past, but also because their categorisation as high art largely absolved them from any ‘inappropriateness’ of symbolic content.8 Second, the preservation of French artefacts was emerging as potentially significant, with those pieces newly perceived as historic monuments and, thus, components of the elusive continuity the new regime needed to establish with the past, alongside its agenda of regeneration. During the first phase of the Revolution (1789–92), with the monarchy precariously still in place, many proposals regarding the transformation of Church property into ‘national’ monuments were couched in idealised, encyclopaedic projects, where the arts, letters and sciences were brought together both as theoretical knowledge and concrete artefacts, to compose a multi-institution of study, instruction and general enlightenment, spearheading the advancement of the nation.9 A great number of such proposals were put forward during those three years, including several by prominent figures such as the diplomat Talleyrand, the philosopher Condorcet and, intriguingly, Quatremère de Quincy himself, the latter to be discussed later in the book. It is also worth mentioning here the project of antiquarian and naturalist Aubin-Louis Millin, presented to the National Assembly in December 1790, under the title Antiquités nationales ou Recueil de monuments pour servir à l’histoire générale et particulière de l’empire français (‘National antiquities or collection of monuments to serve the general and particular history of the French Empire’). Unlike the other encyclopaedic proposals for national monuments, this one avoided the difficulties associated with the conservation of the actual works by suggesting they are ‘collected’ via representation in illustrated volumes instead. Millin completed his five-volume work in 1798. According to Françoise Choay, the preface to this work, presented to the Assembly in 1790, was the first instance of the use of the term ‘historic monument’, although, as Dominique Poulot has shown in an earlier study, Bernard de Montfaucon had clearly described monuments as ‘testimonies of past times’ and tantamount to ‘historic facts’ themselves.10 Less ambitiously but more consequentially, the two main committees in charge of nationalised property, in conjunction with the Commission of Monuments, issued four Instructions between 1790 and 1791, promoting conservation. Although ostensibly practical documents, aiming to take stock and protect from theft and vandalism the vast wealth of Church property suddenly left unguarded, the Instructions played a key role in defining cultural value and, therefore, in shaping the idea of national monument.11 Much of what was recorded, of course, ended up in the foundries or sold, to fuel the increasingly costly Revolutionary campaigns. At the same time, the Instructions also issued specific criteria for the preservation of artefacts on the grounds of either artistic or, significantly, historic interest. For example, the Third Instruction of 1790 stated that ‘all monuments older than the year 1300 shall be conserved because of the representation 6

introduction

of costumes’, as well as ‘monuments which are not the above, but are instructive for history or the epochs of art’.12 With the abolition of monarchy (10 August 1792) and the execution of the king (21 January 1793), the entire royal property was nationalised and added to the responsibilities of the Commission of Monuments. With it arose a new urgency: the monuments of monarchy represented a more direct threat than religious images, and provoked hatred in a way that religion never quite did; so they became the target of both authorised and spontaneous destruction on a devastating scale. Despite the decree of April 1793 penalising with two years’ imprisonment those who ‘by malevolence, destroyed or damaged monuments of arts and sciences’, the Commission of Monuments was quite overwhelmed. On 4 July, the National Convention, which had replaced the Assembly as the highest governing body on 10 August 1792, decreed that all symbols of the Ancien Régime were to be destroyed within eight days, upon pain of confiscation of the property where such symbols still existed. The same decree, however, also stated that a sub-committee of the Commission of Monuments would supervise the operation so that no monument worthy of conservation would be damaged during this process. The Minister of the Interior, Dominique Garat, saw no conflict in this, suggesting that the removal of the feudal signs was a ‘restoration’ of the monuments and their ‘restitution in the cult of Liberty’.13 Nevertheless, in October of the same year, during an ‘expiatory ceremony’ of a kind that was becoming very popular – this time for the assassination of Revolutionary hero Jean-Paul Marat in July – a whole edifice of paintings and other art works from the king’s collection was constructed in Fontainebleau and ritually burned, in order to ‘appease the spirit of this victim of fanaticism’.14 Later the same month, the Commission of Monuments was also forced by the Committee of Public Safety to conduct one of the most famous and extreme acts of revolutionary destruction, the desecration of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, the traditional burial place of French kings since the sixth century. The justification was that ‘these monuments of idolatry still nourish the superstition of some Frenchmen’.15 But for the aggressive spirit of the times, this wasn’t enough: the Commission of Monuments was accused of slackness and of ‘not keeping pace with the Revolution’, and was eventually replaced by the Temporary Arts Commission, on 18 December 1793.16 The problems did not cease with this administrative change. The Arts Commission was faced with exactly the same paradoxical task of conserving the French artistic heritage while destroying all reference to proscribed ideals. Under the circumstances, it is both surprising and a testimony to the long-term necessity of the idea of heritage that proposals for the preservation of Ancien Régime monuments were ongoing throughout the most radical and iconoclastic phase of the Revolution, between the summer of 1792 and the summer of 1794. As Édouard Pommier has noted, common among all those of proposals was the emerging idea that the art of the past was a national treasure, which, far from threatening the new regime would actually contribute to its longevity and glory, by showing that the Revolution was not a mere instance of regeneration, but an enduring state.17 With the Thermidorian reform in July 1794, the execution of Robespierre and the end of the Terror, the worst part of the persecution of the artworks was over. On 31 August, the deputy Henri Grégoire, formerly an abbot and commonly known as 7

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816

Abbot Grégoire, presented to the Convention the famous report that was to mark the new attitude towards national patrimony, by definitively condemning ‘vandalism’ as counterrevolutionary. To conserve and display the monuments of the Ancien Régime, wrote Grégoire, was to condemn it to eternal pillory and, thus, to reinforce the people’s hatred of the tyrants.18 Two more reports in the same vein were to follow in the same year, and in late 1795, Lenoir’s plans for a Museum of French Monuments at the PetitsAugustins, ongoing since 1793, were finally approved. Nevertheless, the art of the past continued to create friction, as the history of Lenoir’s project confirms. Beyond the dilemma between conservation and destruction, which had ceased to be a burning issue by 1795, a new territory of irresolution emerged, concerning the precise role of the pieces that were to be conserved. The concept of the ‘historic monument’ had been coined but, far from resolving the problem, its inherent ambiguities were to perpetuate the confusion beyond the duration of the Revolution. Throughout the vicissitudes concerning the Ancien Régime heritage, the idea of the museum had been consistently developing on the pro-conservation side of the conflict. Since 11 August 1792, a day after the fall of the monarchy, another significant commission was operating alongside that of monuments: it was the Museum Commission, whose exclusive concern was the Louvre. Throughout the struggle with the art of the Ancien Régime, this commission was gathering the uncontested masterpieces of painting and sculpture from across the nation in order to furnish the French Museum, as the new institution was referred to. The national showcase of artistic accomplishment was to open to the public on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the fall of the monarchy, as part of the grand festival of National Unity. The encounters of that commission with the problem of counterrevolutionary references in the works at the Louvre were far from negligible. It is significant, however, that the problem was almost invariably overcome in the name of art, as these were works whose legitimacy as universally recognised masterpieces had already replaced their role as situated components of a certain social and metaphysical hierarchy. In short, the Louvre was dealing in high art, the least ambiguous of the Ancien Régime inheritance, whereas the largest body of French monuments, sculpture and architectural fragments from the Middle Ages onwards, was at the heart of the controversy. The Museum of Monuments was the first project to be realised that dealt with those highly controversial pieces, although proposals for a similar type of institution were ongoing since 1790. The fact that five years had to pass before a project of that kind was finally realised testifies for the extent of the controversy surrounding the matter. The central problem of these proposals was their reliance on the concept of history. The French monuments in question were not addressed as high art and, therefore, arguments for their conservation could only draw from the newly emerging idea of historic monument. The implications of this concept were still largely unclear but somehow urgently felt, with the term increasingly used during Revolutionary debates on art, as we have already seen. The idea of collecting and preserving such artefacts in a museum was the logical complement to the character of the historic monument, enhancing the constructive role of the latter through the creation of a new context, that of the institution, where the monument could operate unencumbered by the possible 8

introduction

residues of its previous existence. It would have been far more difficult to read the royal tombs as manifestations of the progress and decline of French art, and consequently of the endurance of the French nation, if those tombs were encountered in their original contexts, where they had been worshipped as religious artefacts for centuries. The deand re-contextualisation in the new institution of the museum was the perfect catalyst for these artefacts to be purged from their previous associations. Instead of complete erasure of memory and meaning, a simple transformation was performed, whereby traditional symbolism was translated into historic significance. On 4 October 1790, François Puthod de Maisonrouge presented to the Assembly a programme for collecting all nationalised property – still, at the time, only the Church’s – in one place, which he called a museum. He proposed this to happen in each city across the country, thus preventing the dispersal and destruction of all those monuments, which were ‘precious testimonies to history’. He described the pieces in question as primarily inscriptions, tombs and other sculptures, and defended his proposal as both driven by and conducive to patriotism, and serving historical truth. ‘It is the truth of history that we must concern ourselves with from now on,’ he wrote, and added: ‘The pride of seeing a family heritage becoming a national one will achieve what mere patriotism has not yet been able to.’19 According to Pommier, with this phrase de Maisonrouge invented the notion of national heritage, not only through the use of the word patrimoine (‘inheritance’ or ‘heritage’), but also because of the explicit articulation of the transformation of a private possession into something belonging to and defining the collective as a whole.20 The concept of history also drove the museum proposal of Armand de Kersaint, count by origin but Revolutionary by choice, and deputy of the Legislative Assembly, who presented his ‘Discourse on Public Monuments’ to the department of Paris on 15 December 1791.21 De Kersaint urged for the creation of establishments that would ensure the glorification of the Revolution, and the museum was one of them. ‘The monuments’, he wrote, ‘are irreproachable testimonies of history’, and their unification under one roof would ensure the communication of that history as ‘one great succession, dilapidated yet brilliant’.22 Doyen himself, the original supervisor of all depots, had proposed in March 1791 a museum of Ancien Régime statues and monuments in the abbey of Saint-Denis, which he suggested would be a ‘an interesting collection for our history’.23 In May of the same year, elaborating on his earlier proposal, Doyen explicitly mentioned the Petits-Augustins as one of the several places where such a museum could actually be established. There were many other such plans, based on French monuments and history, between 1790 and 1793. As expected, they all but ceased during the Terror of 1793–94, but they were indicative of a changing sensibility. Perhaps one of the most intriguing proposals for a museum incorporating French monuments was one of the earliest: that of Louis de Bréquigny, eminent academic and member of the Commission of Monuments. It was presented to that commission on 2 December 1790, and was largely an elaboration of Puthod de Maisonrouge’s proposal, but with a fascinating twist. Bréquigny suggested that each department of Paris should have one of the aforementioned museums, housed in former churches. He wrote that therein should be collected all those ‘monuments of the arts and sciences’ deemed 9

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worthy of conservation, for ‘public instruction’. He proceeded to lay out a standard plan of arrangement for these institutions, with the chapels dedicated to books, the naves for statues and mausolea, the higher part of the walls for paintings, the sacristies for maps, the choirs for naturalia and curiosities, and the bell-towers for the lodgings of the guardian. Exceptional architectural ornaments would also be removed from their original buildings and incorporated in the museum building itself. Finally, as this was still 1790 and the abolition of religion had not yet taken place, it was possible for Bréquigny to make the unusual suggestion that the museum should also continue to provide for Christian worship.24 In Troyes, such a museum was actually decreed, though never realised, in the town’s cathedral, with the following words: Thus, the capital of the region will become a sacred museum, where contemporary arts and letters can search for their models, piety for its examples, taste for its lessons and religion will be exulted in the midst of its monuments and marvels.25

Such an encompassing establishment, where instruction in the arts and sciences, taste, and piety would be simultaneously developed in harmony, captured perfectly the mood surrounding the emergence of Lenoir’s project. The word ‘history’ was used neither in Bréquigny’s proposal nor in the museum at Troyes, but it was implicit in the totalising nature of the project, not necessarily as chronology, but certainly as temporal duration and continuity. This book will argue that, despite the absence of an operative church and a chronological arrangement, the Museum of Monuments was to become the closest realisation of such a vision, replacing religion with the worship of nationhood, and transcending history through an investment in myth, thus offering a more totalising structure than even Bréquigny had imagined.26 The structure of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 traces the history of the Museum of Monuments in its political context, aiming to show that it was a project shaped by personal input as much as it was by external interventions and circumstance. Beyond the necessary opportunism to keep the project afloat in those troubled times, Lenoir’s decision-making was consistent enough to suggest a coherent intent regarding the role of the museum in the great project of inventing a national identity and rediscovering a common ground in the landscape of history beyond the recent traumas of the Revolution. This chapter also identifies a number of key traits of the museum, such as the investment in commemoration of personalities and the role of the printed catalogues for the visitor experience. Chapter 2 is a presentation of the museum, based on Lenoir’s catalogues and other writings, surviving images from a number of sources, including Lenoir’s own drawings, and visitors’ reports. The latter are discussed in some length, in order to demonstrate the project’s general popularity and the grounds on which this rested. Further key traits of the museum are also identified, such as the importance of the decoration of the halls and overall ambience, and the appeal to the sentiment of the visitors as much, if not more, than their intellect. Chapter 3 offers a synthetic interpretation of the Museum of Monuments following the analysis in the previous two chapters, situating it in its contemporary intellectual and 10

introduction

cultural context, and identifying it as a quest for identity and order in history through the medium of art. Through the presentation of various overlaid histories – the genealogy of epochs and political events, the development of artistic styles, personal stories – woven around great constants such as nature and the common origins of civilisation, sentiment and the Enlightenment ideal, and engaging the visitor equally intellectually, aesthetically and emotionally, the museum is shown to have transcended its historicist basis, emerging as an active engagement with myth, and a poetic endeavour. Chapter 4 introduces the opposition to the Museum of Monuments, focusing on the critique of Quatremère de Quincy, and reinterpreting it in the context of his greater theory of art and conservation. Amidst considerable ambiguity and conflicting positions, Quatremère’s main concern is revealed to be the loss of the ‘moral utility’ of the art of the past and its relevance to a contemporary audience – coinciding with one of the key problems that the Museum of Monuments aimed to address. Despite their apparent conflict, the positions represented by the Museum of Monuments and Quatremère are reconciled in Chapter 5, in terms of their underlying intentions: to reposition art in the context of radical cultural shifts and to address its newly understood historicity as a means of establishing a sense of cultural order. Rather than a cause of the alienation that Quatremère lamented, the museum institution is shown to be an inevitable consequence of those shifts, and the Museum of Monuments a pioneering and significant instance of such an institution. Notes 1 The French art historian Louis Courajod published a detailed account of the project between 1878 and 1887, effectively an extensive apologia, in response to the controversy that had plagued it throughout its short life. See Louis Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir. Son journal et le Musée des Monuments Français, 3 vols (Paris, 1878–87). 2 Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, 1994), Chapter 5. There are several scholars who have touched upon the museum in their work, including Francis Haskell, Edward Pommier, Dario Gamboni and Jennifer Carter, the latter most recently through a few interesting short papers, deriving from an unpublished PhD thesis. It is in the work of Dominique Poulot, however, that the Museum of Monuments has received the most extended and insightful attention published so far, albeit dispersed in a large number of different publications addressing, mainly, the ideas of national patrimony and historic monument emerging in Revolutionary France. 3 The standard account of Lenoir’s life, written as an extended obituary upon his death, is CharlesNicolas Allou, ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux d’Alexandre Lenoir’, Mémoires de la Société royale des Antiquaires de France, XVI/VI (Paris, 1842), pp. 4–26; for less detailed and less reverential accounts, see McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, and Poulot, ‘Alexandre Lenoir et les Musées des Monuments français’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, II: La nation (Paris, 1986), pp. 497–532. 4 For a detailed overview of these attitudes, see Édouard Pommier, L’art de la liberté: Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française (Paris, 1991). 5 See Dominique Poulot, ‘Le Louvre imaginaire: Essai sur le statut du musée en France, des Lumières à la République’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, 17/2 (1991), pp. 171–204, and McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, pp. 1–90.

11

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 6 See Dominique Poulot, ‘Naissance du monument historique’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, XXXII (1985), p. 421. 7 The definitive study of this subject remains Pommier, L’art de la liberté. 8 Some cases proved to be more difficult than others, as demonstrated by the affair of Rubens’ Medici cycle of paintings, described in McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, pp. 109–11. Still, ‘art’ usually won the day when dealing with recognised masterpieces. 9 See Pommier, L’art de la liberté, pp. 41–91. 10 Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (Cambridge, 2001), p. 64; Poulot, ‘Naissance du monument historique’, pp. 420–21. 11 For an account of these Instructions, see Patrick J. Boylan, ‘Revolutionary France and the Foundations of Modern Museum Management and Curatorial Practice, Part 1: From Revolution to the First Republic, 1798–1792’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 11/2 (1992), and ‘Revolutionary France and the Foundations of Modern Museum Management and Curatorial Practice, Part 2: ‘David and Vicq d’Azur, 1792–1794’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 15/2 (1996). 12 Boylan, ‘Revolutionary France and the Foundations of Modern Museum Management and Curatorial Practice, Part 1’, p. 149. 13 Louis Tuetey (ed.), Procès-verbaux de la Commission des monuments, vol. I (Paris, 1902), p. 350. 14 Archives Parlementaires, vol. LXXVII (Paris, 1870), pp. 648–51. 15 For a detailed account and references of the whole event, see Jacques Saint-Germain, La seconde mort des rois de France (Paris, 1972). 16 James Guillaume (ed.), Procès-verbaux du Comité d’instruction publique de la Convention nationale (Paris, 1891–1957), vol. III, pp. 180–81. 17 Pommier, L’art de la liberté, p. 107. 18 Rapport sur les destructions opérées par le vandalisme et sur les moyens de le réprimer, Paris, 14 fructidor year II (1794). 19 Archives Parlementaires, vol. XIX (Paris, 1870), p. 472. 20 Pommier, L’art de la liberté, pp. 44–5. 21 It was published the following year; see Armand Guy Comte de Kersaint, Discours sur les monuments publics (Paris, 1792). 22 Ibid., p. 42. 23 Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter AN) F17 1032 (15 March 1791). 24 Tuetey, Procès-verbaux, pp. 265–7. 25 Quoted in Dominique Poulot, ‘Surveiller et s’instruire’: La Révolution française et l’intelligence de l’héritage historique, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 344 (Oxford, 1996), p. 148. 26 Lenoir actually proposed the consecration of a chapel alongside the collection of monuments in his museum, where services would be held for the illustrious dead, as part of his desperate attempts to adapt the project to the sensibilities of the newly restored monarchy and thus save it from closure.

12

1 A History

The Depot In 1609, a dispute between the monastic order of the Augustins and the queen, Marguerite de Valois, led to the foundation of the order of the Petits-Augustins and a vow on her part to provide the latter with a new convent. The queen was to die in 1615, deep in debt, without having completed anything but a chapel – the Chapelle des Louanges. Eventually, after what must have been a hasty and compromised construction, a rather unremarkable building was completed, in the plain style of the mendicant orders. Nearly two centuries later, the events of the 1789 Revolution were to pluck the convent from its relative obscurity. When a number of religious buildings in Paris were converted to depots for the collection of nationalised Church property, the convent of the Petits-Augustins became the largest of these, as decreed by the Committee for the Alienation of National Assets, on 15 October 1790.1 A month earlier, on 10 September, the same committee had written to the distinguished painter Gabriel François Doyen, asking him to assist in the daunting task of identifying and evaluating the great artistic wealth of the capital, with a particular emphasis on paintings and objects of precious metals.2 Doyen readily accepted the position, expressing his particular regret for the destruction and loss of masterpieces that had been occurring in the past year. He was given carte blanche to decide what was to be conserved on the basis of artistic merit and what was to be otherwise disposed of, usually sold for the value of the raw material. By June 1791, Doyen had accompanied members of the Bureau of Liquidation to over two dozen Parisian churches, in search of artworks to transport to the Petits-Augustins. In December 1791, he left for St Petersburg, invited by the Empress Catherine II to take up a position as professor at the Imperial Academy. His departure was quite sudden and unexplained, and the authorities expected him back for over a year before finally declaring him émigré and confiscating his property in October 1793. Several months before departing, however, Doyen had assisted Alexandre Lenoir, his student for fifteen years, to become the official guardian of the Petits-Augustins depot. Doyen used his friendship with the mayor of Paris, Jean-Sylvan Bailly, to promote Lenoir to this position in June 1791. Lenoir had already been working as a volunteer at the 13

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816

1.1  Sketch of the convent of the Petits-Augustins, as seen from the rue de Petite-Seine

depot for nine months while lobbying for an official position, participating in as many conservation-oriented activities as he could. It is indicative of the extent to which Lenoir’s regularisation was a favour rather than based on merit that his appointment was heavily criticised by the world of art connoisseurs, who felt that the position should have gone to one of them.3 Lenoir embraced his task as guardian of the depot with a zeal well beyond the requirements of the job, which mainly involved the recording and labelling of all pieces arriving in the depot and the regular preparation of lists for the Commission of Monuments. He would accompany the commission to its daily surveys of churches, where inventories were prepared and works chosen for transfer to the depots. At that stage, he did not have much say in what was sent to the Petits-Augustins, but he did occupy himself extensively with the arrangement of whatever pieces he got, betraying a vision about the depot that clearly transcended its anonymous and transitory current state. When the engraver Moreau, member of the Commission of Monuments, visited the place on 18 June 1793, he reported that a serious and permanent installation of the works was taking place, with several damaged monuments restored and mounted on pedestals, and even embedded in the walls of the building.4 Lenoir’s intentions were perpetually conflicting with the transitory nature of the depot. During this phase, he corresponded furiously with all relevant authorities, challenging almost every other order of removal and conjuring up every conceivable excuse to prevent the objects from leaving the depot. An interesting such example involved the family tomb of Thou, a bronze monument taken from the Petits-Augustins to the foundry in November 1793, which Lenoir managed to get back after sending a letter to the Commune of Paris, where he pointed out how promptly he had complied with recent orders to send 80 paintings from the depot to be burnt in a popular festival, and therefore deserved to have his request granted this time.5 Occasionally, he even took desperate measures, such as whitewashing two bronzes by the sculptor Sarrazin to disguise them as plaster and save them from the foundry.6 His evasive tactics, however, were mostly unsuccessful, 14

a history

especially against the Museum Commission. The project of the Louvre carried enormous significance, and its commission had effectively unchallenged priority of choice over any object for it. Still, Lenoir argued and delayed matters considerably. Often a dozen letters would have to be exchanged between himself, the Museum Commission and the Minister of the Interior before Lenoir finally complied with the initial order and delivered whatever it was the commission demanded.7 The Minister of the Interior, Dominique Joseph Garat, visited the depot on 9 July 1793 in the company of Bertrand Barère, deputy of the National Convention and member of the Committee of Public Safety.8 Perhaps unexpectedly, he enjoyed what he saw, which, considering the report of Moreau a month earlier, must have been a situation indicative of Lenoir’s more permanent plans – but he certainly didn’t take any serious notice of it. On 22 July, Lenoir received a letter on behalf of the minister, ordering him to deliver immediately not only the aforementioned paintings, but also a large number of other objects urgently required by the Museum Commission, in view of the museum’s imminent scheduled opening. On the same day, a panicked Lenoir replied to Garat with a letter that was to change the fortune of the depot: Citizen Minister, after your visit on the 9th of the present at the depot in my care and the conversation you had with the citizen Barère and myself, where you approved of my actions to not let anything leave the depot, I could never have imagined that I would receive such a letter as I did from you today. Nevertheless, as no one desires more than I to make available to the Nation its own treasures, would it not be possible, without compromising the essence of your plans or your patriotic vows, to grant a public opening to this small collection of works you have just visited [the Petits-Augustins], on whichever days in the week it would please you, thus avoiding the obvious difficulties associated with their transportation?9

As a result, on 31 July, Lenoir received an order from Garat to open the depot to the public every day during 3–18 August, morning and evening, for the celebrations of the first anniversary of the abolition of the monarchy.10 The National Guard troops would be visiting Paris from all over the country for the occasion, and of course, the muchheralded opening of the Louvre was set for 10 August. For this occasion, two main sections of the former convent were utilised: the church, which was given over to the exhibition of paintings, and the cloisters, where sculptures and architectural fragments were arranged, already aiming for dramatic effect. It is interesting to note that Lenoir opted here for a carefully ‘confused’ arrangement, showing deliberate disregard for historical context and provenance, with pieces set next to each other so as to clash, in order to create a rich mixture of forms and styles, rather than to give any sense of continuity. At this point, the effect would have not been dissimilar to the great gallery of the Louvre, just across the river, with its eclectic, old-school tapestry of paintings covering the walls from floor to ceiling.11 The opening proved a considerable success, and Lenoir was given permission to keep the depot available to the public until September, the same as the Louvre, which was to close for refurbishment after that. Since June 1793, Lenoir had prepared a catalogue, the Notice succincte des objets de sculpture et architecture réunis au Dépôt provisoire national rue des Petits-Augustins (‘Brief note on the objects of sculpture and architecture collected at the provisional national 15

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816

Depot of the rue des Petits-Augustins’), which he proceeded to distribute to all his visitors. His explanation that this was ‘distributed gratis in order to allow authorities and public alike to form their own judgement’ suggested that his curatorial work was as much at stake as the collection itself.12 Just before the August opening of the depot, he had sent the catalogue to the Commission of Monuments, which responded in an unsurprisingly ambiguous manner. On one hand, it complimented Lenoir for setting up such an exhibition of ‘beautiful pieces’, but on the other, it pointed out that certain errors were manifest and, perhaps most poignant of all, that the commission was not consulted at any point in this operation.13 To those in the commission who were against Lenoir already, this would have provided another reason to dislike the enterprising guardian: not only was the catalogue an unauthorised initiative, financed privately by Lenoir, it also failed to acknowledge the commission’s own work in the compilation of the Petits-Augustins collection, which Lenoir was presenting as entirely due to his own efforts. Despite the successful interval of this temporary opening, or perhaps all the more for it, Lenoir had managed to displease several authorities considerably. In the end, he had to relinquish everything that the Louvre demanded: all the paintings, the Classical sculptures and some of the more precious pieces of modern sculpture. But that was not until 1795. His first obedient turn coincided with the height of the Terror, from just after the temporary opening of the Petits-Augustins, until the fall of Robespierre the following July. Lenoir delivered works from the depot, including paintings about to be burned in ceremonial pyres. The most interesting event for Lenoir and the depot during the Terror was the involvement in the events of Saint-Denis, in the second half of 1793. On 1 August 1793, the National Convention declared the celebratory destruction of the royal tombs in the cathedral of Saint-Denis, the traditional burial place of French kings, to commemorate the anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy. In the following days, dozens of monuments were destroyed, and on 10 August, a monumental mount was erected to Revolutionary heroes Marat and Le Pelletier from architectural and human remains just outside the cathedral. Lenoir was present throughout these events, accompanying Dom Poirier, the official government representative, to record the proceedings. Lenoir kept a detailed account, including sketches of the corpses and a combination of the most emotive and most prosaic comments.14 At the same time, he did his best to salvage as many monuments as he could. There are several period drawings, including the one on the cover of this book by Pierre-Joseph Lafontaine, showing the intrepid curator single-handedly defending the tomb of Louis XII at Saint-Denis, although these could well be more a contribution to the anti-vandalist mythology of the Thermidorian Republic than a reflection of true events. Nevertheless, the monumental tomb of Louis XII was saved, together with those of François I, Henri II, Charles VI and many smaller pieces, due to Lenoir’s intervention. The first convoy of salvaged works from Saint-Denis reached the Petits-Augustins on 29 November 1793, with more to follow. Despite the extensive destruction, the ancient cathedral was still full of sculptures and ornaments which Lenoir was hoping to transfer to the depot, thus enriching his collection with some of the most significant French monuments in the capital. 16

a history

1.2 Anonymous, Alexandre Lenoir opposing the destruction of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, 1793, Louvre, Paris © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

However, what exactly Lenoir’s intentions were for the collection at the time is open to speculation. Despite the obvious effort going into the enrichment and arrangement of the Petits-Augustins as something more permanent, it is clear that his ambitions were not limited to the depot. Initially, Lenoir had wanted to be member of the prestigious Museum Commission, created in October 1792.15 Having failed, he still entertained the idea of an involvement with the Louvre through a merger of the collection at his depot – of which he would always have to be the expert conservator and curator – and an all-inclusive Louvre. His two publications of year II (1793–94) were, to a large extent, attempts to convince the authorities of his competence and worthiness for the task. One was the first catalogue of his depot, the aforementioned Notice succincte in its second printing of December 1793, and the other was the Essai sur le Muséum de peinture (‘Essay on the Museum of painting’), a proposal for the development of the Louvre. Both of these Lenoir sent to the Committee of Public Instruction and the Temporary Arts Commission in the summer and autumn of 1794. In the covering letter accompanying the Notice succincte, Lenoir expressed a clear intention for the PetitsAugustins. He wrote that he would like to save from annihilation ‘the masterpieces which used to decorate the temples of the fanatics, the palaces of the tyrants and the houses of their affiliates’, especially medieval antiquities and samples of the whole chronology of French art, much neglected to this day.16 Lenoir’s expertise was on show in this publication, alongside the monuments themselves. Lenoir also brought up his additional abilities as a restorer of outstanding paintings, still in the depot at the time, making special mention to a Deluge attributed to Tintoretto, which he claimed to have found in three hundred pieces before restoring it to its former glory.17 17

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816

Despite the indications in accompanying letters and reports, the Notice succincte itself was not chronologically structured. There were 256 numbered entries in the catalogue referring to objects – or, sometimes, groups of objects – in no apparent order. The vast majority were sculptural and architectural fragments from religious establishments, mostly in Paris, ranging in date from the fourteenth century to the very last years before the Revolution. There were also a handful of earlier medieval sculptures and 19 pieces dated to Roman Antiquity. Finally, there were the two famous Michelangelo Slaves, originally given to François I during his reign and subsequently acquired for cardinal Richelieu’s garden. More precisely, the main body of the collection was composed exclusively of French pieces from the past five centuries: 104 were fragments (statues, busts, reliefs and so on), or less frequently, whole structures of funerary and commemorative monuments; 93 were architectural fragments (columns, friezes, reliefs and so on, and some ornamental statuary), and 32 were autonomous devotional sculptures. There were also six entries of objects from the early Middle Ages, including statues of the legendary kings of France Childebert and Clovis. With the Roman pieces, the Slaves and a few other works swiftly claimed by the Louvre, the depot was left with funerary and commemorative sculptures since the beginning of the French monarchy, and architectural fragments. Ten days after the receipt of this catalogue, the Temporary Arts Commission communicated to Lenoir their approval of his work and ordered two copies of the publication. At the same time, the guardian was given permission to transfer to the depot sculptures from Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Hospice de la Charité. A week later, Jean-Baptiste Mathieu, President of the Commission, sent another encouraging letter to Lenoir: The Temporary Arts Commission observes with satisfaction the order that you have established in the Depot and the care you take to conserve objects of the sciences and the arts. The recognition of the Commission ought to be the most flattering recompense and the most powerful encouragement to further augment your civic zeal and your activity regarding the objects in your care. Accept the congratulations of the Commission with as much pleasure as is mine for belonging to it.18

For all its praise, however, it was not up to this commission to decide the fate of the depot. The powerful Committee of Public Instruction had already responded to Lenoir earlier in August, during the temporary opening of the depot, rejecting the proposal for a permanent opening on political grounds, as it contained ‘too many images of tyrants, their wives and children, to be able to talk about this at the moment’.19 Nevertheless, the phrase ‘at the moment’ indicated that such a project was no longer out of the question, anticipating the actual opening of the Museum of Monuments fourteen months later. Over the course of the next year, Lenoir corresponded with the Committee of Public Instruction, putting forward his case that a permanent display of the nation’s sculpture was essential to the much-needed regeneration of the arts. A new strategy is clear in this phase of his correspondence where he appeared to be sidelining the plea for a public opening of his depot in favour of an incorporation of his collection with the Louvre. In support of his proposition, Lenoir sent the committee his Notice, the depot’s catalogue, arguing that all depots should do something similar. This was in order to 18

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assist with the essential enrichment and restructuring of the Louvre, which was hastily opened in August 1793 for the anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy, but was ‘undoubtedly, a poor sketch of the envisaged museum of the Republic’, as he put it, on which the foundations for future artistic production would be laid. Lenoir also sent the committee a more detailed proposal for what he saw as a worthy national museum, his Essai sur le Muséum de peinture.20 This essay was a considerable museological statement, influenced by current trends – most notably Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun’s Réflexions sur le Muséum national (‘Reflections on the national Museum’), yet quite significant in its own right. In the Essai, Lenoir adhered to the popular theme of the utility of the arts, whereby the new Republic, the ‘regenerator of men’, was to be strengthened and promoted through an equally regenerated artistic production. He exalted: this amazing Revolution, which, having changed the face of the world politically, ought to extend itself further to the sciences, letters and arts and, principally, to the arts of the imagination, the influence of which is so powerful on men.

This emphasis on the power of the ‘arts of the imagination’ is quite significant for Lenoir’s entire museological opus, and a key principle in the creation of his own museum. In the spirit of the German art historian Johan Joachim Winckelmann, Lenoir proceeded to exalt the art of the ancients and the importance of the study of their works for the proper development of an artist’s imagination, alongside the faithful observation of nature. However, Lenoir broke from the influential German’s path on two important points: first, he believed that the perfection of the ancients could be matched in the contemporary world, as this was the task of the new Republic; and secondly, he added the study of modern masterpieces – that is, after Antiquity – to the necessary instruction of artists. Finally, Lenoir proposed the overall arrangement of the Louvre by chronology, so as to promote the comparison of the history of the arts to that of time.21 Although Lenoir called the Louvre a museum of painting in his eponymous essay, he also proposed for it the establishment of a substantial gallery of sculpture. Therein would be exhibited not only the expected Classical pieces, but also Egyptian, Etruscan, Indian as well as French medieval, Renaissance and eighteenth-century works – that is, the pieces he was collecting at the Petits-Augustins. This is significant, as it contextualises the seeming abandonment of his plans for the depot into what was arguably an attractive ‘Plan B’: the transposition of the entire collection in the nation’s most prominent institution. Such a move would result in Lenoir inevitably losing a degree of control over his project, but would be amply compensated with a place on the highly prestigious Museum Commission. It has been suggested that this episode with the Louvre confirms that Lenoir was merely an opportunist and undermines his independent vision for the collection of monuments in his depot.22 Arguably, however, this was not the case. Lenoir, despite changing positions in response to the volatile political context, was consistent in his proposal for a unified public display of those monuments, based on the idea of a chronological sequence as a medium for communicating a loftier narrative. Whilst there is no doubt that Lenoir was somewhat of an opportunist – he would probably not have survived the times if he wasn’t – it is clear that he also held a deep conviction 19

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of the crucial role these contested objects could play in the newly developing culture of collecting. At the same time, throughout 1794, Lenoir was granted permission to augment his collection with several transfers to his depot, in the name of safeguarding monuments from destruction. He also continued with his creative restorations, his fabriques, where he would often combine fragments of monuments into one composition. By July 1795, feeling the circumstances to be increasingly favourable towards anti-vandalist projects, Lenoir submitted a report to the Committee of Public Instruction proposing the creation of a museum at the depot of the Petits-Augustins.23 The report was a long justification of the work he had done on the depot so far, followed by the proposal of measures that would improve things further. After a brief presentation of the most important monuments already in the depot, Lenoir went on to defend the measures he’d taken for their welfare, as well as for displaying them to their best advantage for the instruction of artists and the enjoyment of the public. The report continued with an explanation of the importance of his catalogue, which, he did not fail to mention, was published at his own expense. The main part of the report was the presentation of Lenoir’s three exemplary ‘conservations’, as he described them: the marble Descent from the Cross from Saint-Laundry by Girardon, which had arrived at the depot in more than one hundred pieces before Lenoir reassembled it; the famous mausoleum of Richelieu from the Sorbonne chapel, which Lenoir’s personal initiative alone saved from destruction; and Tintoretto’s painting of the Deluge, reassembled from three hundred pieces, already mentioned in the Notice succincte. This presentation led Lenoir to reprise his argument about his fabriques, as the necessary reassembling of badly damaged monuments into something useful for the arts; the case of François I’s tomb, awaiting restoration at the depot, was presented to further strengthen this plea. Two months later, in the last days of September 1795, Lenoir published and distributed to the relevant authorities a new version of his catalogue, entitled Notice historique des monumens des arts, réunis au Dépôt national (‘Historic note of the monuments of the arts, collected at the national Depot’). Unlike the Notice succincte of 1793, which was a 28-page list of monuments, this work was 112 pages long and an altogether more ambitious work, with extensive commentary, including a treatise on the art of stained glass. There were just over four hundred entries in this catalogue, the majority of which were French sculptures from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Already calling it a ‘museum’, and with a characteristic absence of timidity, Lenoir heralded the collection at the Petits-Augustins as comparable in grandeur and magnificence to the monuments of Rome, Naples and Florence. At this stage, the chronological circuit of the galleries did not yet exist. The chronological principle of display was introduced through certain key categorisations in both catalogue and depot, and supported by the change of the catalogue’s title from Notice succincte to Notice historique. The main thrust of the project was presented as a plight against vandalism. Lenoir firmly embraced its condemnation and the conservationist turn of the Republic by calling his proposed museum ‘an expiatory temple dedicated to good taste and true genius’. Lenoir’s elegiac prose went on to propose that a visit to the museum would inspire a hatred of tyranny, a love of 20

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country, sympathy for its past misfortunes, a respect for the law, the cultivation of fine arts and, finally, the desire to cry out: ‘How fortunate am I to be born French!’24 Official Recognition On 21 October 1795, three weeks after receiving Lenoir’s new catalogue, the Committee of Public Instruction finally declared the Petits-Augustins a permanent exhibition space, allowing it to be open to the public under the name Musée national des antiquités et monumens français (‘National museum of antiquities and French monuments’).25 Until the Minister of the Interior issued a decision on the matter, no monument was to be moved from the place. Not everyone was pleased with this action, least of all Lenoir’s perpetual rival, the Museum Conservatory, which had taken over from the Museum Commission. The conservatory wrote to the Committee of Public Instruction only a week after the above decree, outraged at the emancipation of the Petits-Augustins, which, they argued, set a bad precedent for all other depots and undermined the project of the Museum (the Louvre).26 The new Minister of the Interior, Pierre Bénézech, was generally in favour of Lenoir’s project, so, for the time being, the conservatory’s protests amounted to nothing; however, he was to compensate them significantly in the following year, to Lenoir’s renewed aggravation. On 8 April 1796, Bénézech finally sent Lenoir his statement on the Museum of Monuments. First, he announced that this was not to be a fully autonomous project, but a stage in the collection and arrangement of works that, one day, would be reunited in the Louvre, in order to ‘complete the history of art’. In the mean time, Bénézech continued, it was vital to make the most of the Petits-Augustins and, above all, ‘display the objects as befits them, following a chronological order’. The minister complimented Lenoir’s zeal and intelligence in his work so far, but urged him to consult specialists for future development of the museum. He went on to lift the ban on the removal of monuments from the former depot, explaining at length how the measures he was introducing were to benefit both the Louvre and the Museum of Monuments. The key was that, unlike other depots, there would be a very clear system and plan guiding the transfer of works to and from the Petits-Augustins. This plan was the precise division of categories between the museums, whereby the Louvre could claim everything deemed appropriate for its embellishment that was not ‘monuments of our history’, which, in turn, would be the specific area covered by Lenoir’s establishment. In return, Lenoir was authorised to search for and claim any object appropriate to his museum.27 Bénézech contributed decisively to the shaping of the Parisian museums during his office as Minister of the Interior. Alongside the Louvre and the Museum of Monuments, he founded the Musée special de l’École françoise (‘Special Museum of the French School’) at Versailles for paintings of this kind, including those of living artists formerly in the Louvre. That way, he allowed the great museum of the Republic to attain a more timeless and sublime character refraining from involvement with contemporary production, while giving to the old palace of Versailles a role in the Republican cultural scheme. In light of this scheme, his decree of 1796 placing at the disposal 21

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of the Museum Conservatory all remaining paintings and Classical sculptures from the Petits-Augustins should not be seen as an action against Lenoir and the Museum of Monuments, but rather as a step towards the desired specialisation of the latter.28 Unsurprisingly, however, Lenoir did not appreciate having to relinquish the antiquities from his museum. More correspondence ensued between him and the minister, in which Lenoir put up all manner of protest to avoid the inevitable. The interesting outcome from this episode was the repeated assurances extracted from Bénézech, as compensation for the loss of those pieces to the Louvre, that Lenoir had authority to claim those objects ‘necessary for the integrity of his collection’ from any other site.29 This the enterprising curator certainly did, introducing a new wave of acquisitions for his now official museum. As soon as he received permission for the public opening of his museum, Lenoir started work on the arrangement and decoration of the cloistered rooms around the main courtyard of the former convent, which were to constitute the chronological circuit from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries; there was also to be an introductory hall, finished in 1799, and an eighteenth-century one, never realised. Much was made of this chronological sequencing of the collection, a concept used almost interchangeably with that of history. We saw earlier that Lenoir was already advocating a chronological arrangement in his proposal for a museum at the Petits-Augustins sent to the authorities in August 1794, as well as in his Essai sur le Muséum of the same year, concerning the Louvre. It was surely significant for Lenoir that, although the Louvre did not adopt a chronological system, a number of critics continued to argue for it, effectively equating it with the true spirit of the Enlightenment. An unsigned article in the Décade journal of early 1795, for example, reads that the national museum would benefit from an ‘analytical method’ of display, with the works ‘arranged according to different periods’.30 Lenoir, in his catalogues, presented the Museum of Monuments as a ‘rational scheme’, based ‘on the relationship between the history of France and the history of its arts’, and he suggested that the visitor ‘would travel successively from century to century’ following ‘the chronology of art, basic principle of my work’.31 As soon as the problem of vandalism was over, Lenoir promoted the project’s significance in relation to its historical structure, on which he elaborated at length in the introductory sections of the various catalogue editions. Minister Bénézech’s directions to the same effect in his April 1796 letter to Lenoir provided the official confirmation of the importance of chronology for the project. Further confirmation was supplied by the praise from various eponymous and anonymous visitors. The conversion of the cloistered rooms into the museum’s period halls started almost immediately upon the institution’s ministerial approval in the spring of 1796. The first hall to be completed was the last in the sequence, that of the seventeenth century. Already in 1796, and with just one hall of the actual museum complete, Lenoir began transforming the former convent’s garden into an ‘Elysium’, a commemorative necropolis cum jardin anglais, completed in 1799. Work on the thirteenth-century hall, in the sacristy of the old convent, started almost concurrently with the Elysium, but was already completed in 1796. This hall required extensive reconstruction and decoration in order to achieve an effect ‘appropriate to the style of the thirteenth 22

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century’. The next hall to be created, in the winter of 1796–97, was that of the sixteenth century. According to Lenoir, this was the peak of the French Renaissance, where the arts had come the closest to perfection since Antiquity, though still awaiting their heralded regeneration under the current Republic. Construction on the fifteenthcentury hall began in 1798. The main aim here was to convey the transitional character of the era, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The fourteenthcentury gallery was the last to be created, with work starting in December 1799. It was never quite completed to Lenoir’s satisfaction, although work in it all but ceased after 1805. This hall represented the dramatic shift of style from the primitive Dark Ages to the richness and elegance of the Gothic, introduced to France as an influence from the East after the Crusades. There was also an introductory hall, among the last to be created. Although work was not to start on it until 1799, the proposal for such a hall had already reached Bénézech in June 1797.32 A selection of pieces from all centuries was placed here, forming a panorama of art that Lenoir deemed of particular significance to the whole project. By 1799 and the end of the Revolutionary decade with Napoleon’s coup, the Museum of Monuments was still under construction. While four of the rooms and the Elysium garden were already formed, work on the fourteenth-century and introductory halls was just beginning. Lenoir was continuing to make further plans for his project, including the creation of an eighteenth-century hall, the monumental decoration of the main entrance, and the entire redevelopment of the three courts of the former convent. Even the parts already formed were not, strictly speaking, finished, in the sense that work never quite ceased in the museum. There were always additions and adjustments in process and, until the end, there were always several sculptors, restorers and architects employed by Lenoir. In March 1802, for example, a certain Miss Mary Berry, upon visiting the place, wrote in her journal that ‘the ancient sculptures damaged by vandalism’ were still in the process of being restored, others destined for the Elysium garden were not quite set in place, and that ‘a large number of workmen were employed by M. Le Noir in the vast galleries’.33 Lenoir’s plans for further development of the museum included ambitious constructions in the three courts of the former convent, incorporating the largest architectural fragments Lenoir had ever proposed to acquire, the façades from the châteaux of Anet and Gaillon. Lenoir was also projecting more halls for the expansion of the chronological circuit, which were never executed. In 1809, he wrote about a ‘primitive hall’, which would represent the eleventh century. This would be furnished with sculptural and ornamental pieces from the abbey of Cluny and the demolished cathedral of Cambrai, the remarkable dome of which was to be placed in the garden.34 Already in 1800 Lenoir had envisaged a further hall, the much-discussed but never executed section dedicated to the eighteenth century. By 1809, and despite the continuing absence of a hall for the previous century, he previewed another one for ‘the heroic achievements of Napoleon the Great, Emperor of the French’, to be the ‘contemporary’ hall.35 Finally, in 1811, a manuscript of Lenoir’s suggested that he was also envisaging a gallery of stained glass.36 23

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The Collection Perhaps the most significant aspect of the continuing development of the museum was the growing collection, through acquisition of new pieces and construction of fabriques. Throughout the depot years and until 1796, the main body of French monuments finding their way to the Petits-Augustins were from Parisian churches having suffered damages and often suppressed. The monasteries of the Célestins, the Grands-Augustins, the Minimes, the Feuillants Saint-Honoré and the Petits-Pères, the chapel of the Sorbonne and the churches of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-André-des-Arts, Saint-Étiennedu-Mont, the Sainte-Chapelle of Vincennes, Sainte-Geneviève (later the Panthéon), Notre Dame and Saint-Denis, were the main places where the monuments in the 1793 catalogue originated. At the same time, Lenoir’s initiative was comparatively limited. As the relevant correspondence between 1792 and the first part of 1795 shows, the transportation of pieces to the Petits-Augustins was in the hands of the Commission of Monuments and later the Temporary Arts Commission, themselves answerable to the Committee of Public Instruction, cross-referenced by the Museum Commission (and later the Museum Conservatory), which claimed all the appropriate pieces for the Republic’s cultural showpiece. But since Bénézech’s decree of 1796, Lenoir had been authorised to draw from an indefinite range of sources for his collection. The ministerial authorisation did not specify whether it just referred to pieces in other depots, already removed from their original locations, or whether it also included the largely uncharted territory of nationalised Ancien Régime property still in situ. Lenoir interpreted this substantial ambiguity to his favour and, although during subsequent years of multiple regime changes he would adjust his rhetoric accordingly, it would seem that Bénézech’s founding decree allowed the curator to pursue a course more ambitious than he would have hoped for. After its official recognition, the main body of the museum’s collection was brought to the former convent through Lenoir’s active efforts – causing some controversy, as we shall see shortly. However, it is important to mention that the curator also encouraged donations, as well as commissioning monuments himself. The agenda of safeguarding monuments from vandalism may have featured prominently in the original justification of the project, but it was clear from the outset that Lenoir was investing more broadly in the idea of ‘a history of France through the development of its arts’ and therefore had no qualms in acquiring those pieces missing from his narrative through different means. The donations were either private monuments of noteworthy individuals given by the family of the deceased, or commemorative works donated by living artists, serving the dual purpose of a promise of posterity for themselves and a contribution to Lenoir’s historical vision. Lenoir would also commission a number of monuments when he could not acquire an original piece to represent a personality or aspect of the history of French art as he envisaged it. Besides the works he commissioned, Lenoir was assisted in his constructions by a resident architect, Antoine-Marie Peyre, son of the sculptor Marie-Joseph Peyre. After 1804, Antoine-Laurent Vaudoyer was added to the resident workforce, which by then also included the sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet. The latter was responsible for constructing numerous missing pieces and additions to the 24

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restored monuments, such as the heavily vandalised monument to Diane de Poitiers, originally by Jean Goujon, and several details on Lenoir’s most famous fabrique, the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard.37 Other sculptors and stonemasons were also involved in the extensive works at the museum, though it was clear that they operated strictly under Lenoir’s instructions, as he stated in a later edition of the catalogue.38 At the same time, Lenoir would continue to seek existing pieces to bring to the museum. Since 1796, the scope of his searches had expanded well beyond Paris. Lenoir visited locations and received reports from individuals who were interested in selling pieces they’d originally bought in sales of nationalised property in the previous years. The curator would usually conceal his identity and the purpose of the purchase in order to attain a better price, usually the mere value of the stone, which was what the original purchaser would have paid for the piece in the mass auctions. In some cases, however, the opposite was true. For example, when Lenoir expressed an interest in buying the tomb of Abélard at Chalon-sur-Saône from a certain doctor Boysset, who had, in turn, purchased it merely for the price of the raw material during the Terror, the man only demanded that his name be mentioned in the sculpture’s inscription at the museum as the benefactor without whom this work would not have survived.39 As the years progressed, Lenoir engaged in increasingly drastic acquisitions, causing much controversy with what came to be seen as acts of ‘vandalism’ themselves, reputedly destroying whole edifices in order to bring fragments to his museum. The most prominent of these was the case of the château of Gaillon from the sixteenth century, which, as Church property, was nationalised in 1792 and suffered considerable damage. During 1801–1802, Lenoir transported a whole façade from the building, the fragments of which required three linked barges to sail up the river Seine. Despite accusations that Lenoir had actually provoked the destruction of the château to acquire those fragments, two consecutive Ministers of the Interior, between late 1799 and 1801, had given him their full support for this.40 Lenoir wrote in 1801 that no interest or ambition had guided him to this enterprise other than the desire to make ‘something great and beautiful for the development of our arts and the benefit of my country’.41 The dramatic process of the transportation of those monumental fragments was favourably reported in the Journal des débats. Once it was completed, Chaptal, Minister of the Interior, also wrote a congratulatory note to Lenoir: The artists are in your debt for conserving such a precious monument and the government sends you its assurances of satisfaction for the wise and economic manner in which you executed this feat, which had appeared much more difficult and expensive.42

Lenoir continued to place requests for further acquisitions, which met with varying, even arbitrary, responses. In 1801, he was permitted to transport to the museum the tombs of the Thou family and Le Batteux from Saint-André-des-Arts, that of Philippe Desportes and the funerary statues of Rouville and his wife from the abbey of BonPort, as well as the mausoleum of the Villeroy from the church of Magny, none of which were in any way endangered in their original locations.43 But, in the same year, when he proposed to acquire the de Guise tombs from the Jesuit college of Eu, he was 25

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1.3  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, façade of the château de Gaillon, reconstructed at the entrance of the Elysium, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

categorically refused. The prefect of the area, Beugnot, wrote lengthy letters to Lenoir and Chaptal, Minister of the Interior, arguing that, since the tombs were not threatened by destruction, there was no reason for their displacement, an act which would only impoverish the church in question. Despite the approval of equally ‘unnecessary’ transportations, the minister refused this request.44 The same fate met the request for the tomb of the Count d’Ennery, by the contemporary sculptor Houdon. Despite Lenoir’s lengthy arguments and repeated attempts during 1801–1802, including the artist himself pleading with Chaptal, the latter flatly refused without further explanation, and the tomb was never transported. The inconsistency of Chaptal’s position regarding Lenoir’s requests confirms the continuing absence of established policy or even clarity of understanding concerning the museum and the idea of monument in general, which followed the project from inception to closure. The erratic attitude towards new acquisitions aside, the Napoleonic rule brought with it a new problem for the curator: the favourable turn towards the Church in 1800 saw a large number of religious establishments demanding the return of sculptures and ornaments removed from their premises during the past decade. Between 1802 and 1809, Lenoir had to return 63 such pieces.45 At the same time as sending works back to their places of origin, however, Lenoir was instructed by the authorities to relinquish a considerable number of pieces for the decoration of various other Church and state 26

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buildings in their post-Revolutionary refurbishment. In November 1804, Dominic Vivant-Denon, Director General of Museums, wrote to Lenoir: ‘I am charged, sir, with decorating magnificently the papal chapel. You have Angels in silver and bronze from the Jesuit church of Jesus. I request that you send these to me immediately.’46 Similar examples abound: religious statues by Girardon, Mazières and Slodtz were taken to the church of the Invalides for the decoration of the dome; pieces of a mosaic were removed in order to decorate the throne room of the Palais de l’Institut; a Roman statue representing the River Tiber was requested for the decoration of the town hall,47 and, most notably, the pieces transported to the Empress Josephine’s palace at Malmaison, where Lenoir was to be employed together with Denon to develop and decorate the residence and gardens.48 With the change of regime, several monuments took on a different significance and were now being claimed by other public institutions. A good example is Turenne’s tomb: in 1800, it was no longer impossible to officially honour such a prominent military figure of the Ancien Régime, so his tomb was taken from the Museum of Monuments to be placed at the Invalides. Lenoir, as expected, resented the loss of such a great name from his collection and fought the move vigorously with his imaginative arguments, albeit without success.49 Commemorative Agenda The nominal raison d’être of the collection at the Petits-Augustins and basis of Lenoir’s project, which was to offer sanctuary to endangered monuments of the Ancien Regime, had all but ceased to exist by its official recognition. From 1795, the attitude towards artistic heritage was changing, predominantly through the notion of ‘national patrimony’ and all its implications for the identity of the newly defined nation. By the end of the Revolutionary period in 1799, the removal of sculptures from their original settings could no longer be justified in relation to their safety alone. A reversal had become necessary to the argument for the Museum of Monuments, where the collection was no longer presented as a means for the survival of the removed works, but had instead become in itself sufficient cause for such removals. After the recognition of the museum and the marked change of Revolutionary outlook, the necessity to preserve those works as national heritage was largely accepted. In that light, the argument focused increasingly on the necessity for the collection as a whole and the important contribution the museum itself was making, above and beyond the independent value of the works it contained. In other words, whereas before the issue was to convince that these objects were worthy of sanctuary in the first place, and therefore that such a depot-sanctuary was needed, after the institutionalisation of the museum, the issue became to decide which of the objects still out there would have to be brought in to support and fulfil the project’s agenda. This agenda remained surprisingly constant against the rapid regime changes, despite the superficial switches of allegiance that Lenoir had to effect in order to retain the favour of the powers that be. Whether calling the Christian faith a superstition or 27

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one of the nation’s unifying traits, or presenting François I as a patron of the arts or a glorious monarch, the museum was a developing project aiming to narrate the story of the French nation through its monuments – both notions of ‘nation’ and ‘monument’ being new to the era and offering scope for considerable invention and experimentation. Although the kind of works that stayed at the Petits-Augustins in its first years as a depot were a mixture of sculptures and architectural fragments, soon a definite pattern began to form, becoming even more pronounced as the years progressed. This involved the number of works commemorating a known historical personality, contrasted with other figurative sculptures (angels, the Virgin Mary and so on) and non-figurative pieces (decorative fragments, crosses and so on). The 1793 catalogue showed a fairly even distribution between commemorative and all other pieces, but by year VIII (1799–1800) and the fifth edition of the catalogue, the balance had shifted dramatically towards the commemorative: in 1793, out of 256 catalogue entries, 125 were non-commemorative – that is, 48.8 per cent – whereas in year VIII, that portion had dropped to 28 per cent, 144 out of 513 total entries.50 At the seventh edition of the catalogue (1803), the non-commemorative portion had remained fairly stable at 27 per cent – although this is based on a total of 558 entries when, in fact, 57 of them were marked ‘supprimé’, denoting objects of worship which had been returned to the restored churches after the Emperor’s 1802 decree. With this removal in mind, the proportion of non-commemorative works drops to 18 per cent. This obviously cannot be attributed to Lenoir’s initiative, but what can is the situation depicted in the eighth edition of the catalogue (1806), in which ten new works feature in the museum, all of them funerary monuments of historical figures. Lenoir’s investment in personalities went beyond the selection of existing monuments. His own fabriques were exclusively monuments to prominent historical figures and important artists and men of letters of France. Already in the summer of 1795, even before the museum’s official recognition, Lenoir had begun to erect such constructs. He created a tomb for Descartes in the form of a portico with fluted columns, originally from the church of the Minimes, where he placed the philosopher’s remains.51 Lenoir was frequently supported in both his commemorative agenda and fabrications by the authorities. For example, in 1798 the Museum Directory sent the bodies of Turenne, Molière and La Fontaine to the Museum of Monuments, thus putting an end to the continuing embarrassment surrounding their fate under the Revolution. Complementing Lenoir’s intention to construct monuments for the remains, the Minister of the Interior, François de Neufchâteau, wrote to the curator inviting him to ‘mark each tomb with symbolic attributes characterising the virtues and genius of each man’.52 On the strength of this ministerial approval, Lenoir also transported the remains of the philosopher and poet Boileau from the Sainte-Chapelle, arguing that he was a friend of Molière and La Fontaine, completely side-tracking the fact that the church had been recently returned to Christian worship and therefore there was no conceivable danger to it.53 In February 1800, continuing his collection of personalities against increasing protests from the clergy, Lenoir requested permission to transport to the museum the remains of Pascal and Racine from Saint-Étienne du Mont. On the same day, 28

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he wrote to the Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte, proposing to bring over from Bourgogne and Champagne the two monuments and remains of the legendary medieval lovers Héloïse and Abélard. The old tomb of Abélard came from the abbey of Saint-Marcel at Chalon-sur-Saône. His body had already been transported to the tomb of Héloïse in the monastery of the Paraclet, where she had been abbess, in 1142. When the monastery was suppressed in 1792, the double tomb was transported to Nogentsur-Seine, wherefrom Lenoir brought it to his museum. With the minister’s approval,

1.4  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, tomb of Héloïse and Abélard in the museum garden, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

29

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by mid-1801 all the pieces were collected at the Petits-Augustins and placed in Lenoir’s construct, which incorporated the two tombs and a newly designed arched canopy from the debris of Saint-Denis, as well as the heads of the lovers commissioned from Deseine and added to the existing recumbent statues.54 In May 1799, Lenoir began the process of acquiring the remains of the two Benedictine savants Mabillion and Montfaucon, the latter a pioneer of the study of French monuments and a great influence on Lenoir. These were somewhere in a chapel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which, in the mean time, had become a shop, but nobody was sure of their exact location. When they were finally located in 1805, Minister of the Interior Champagny argued that, since the tombs had long ceased to be in danger, it was unacceptable to try to move them. Lenoir responded with a characteristically defiant missive, arguing that the care and investment he had already placed in these monuments have rendered them ‘the property of the museum and thus the property of France as a whole’, adding that a predecessor of Champagny’s had clearly seen this and already authorised the placement of the monuments in the museum’s garden.55 This was one of the cases where the museum’s agenda won the day over the argument of the monuments’ original settings, and the tombs were duly transported to the PetitsAugustins. Tombs aside, there were other commemorative monuments that Lenoir had constructed from disparate sculptural pieces combined with commissioned busts and other new elements. Around the same time as Descartes’ tomb, Lenoir erected a monument to the obscure Rouhault, student and friend of the great philosopher, who had won his place in the museum by being ‘the most zealous follower of his friend’s system, founded on the phenomena of nature and not mere speculation’. This was put together from a column from Sainte-Geneviève, a marble vase, a black marble sarcophagus by Coustou from the convent of the Minimes, and two caryatides supporting the lot.56 In the second edition of the catalogue, the Notice historique of 1795, a dozen commemorative busts to artists and men of letters of the last couple of centuries were featured, including some newly commissioned by Lenoir. In the years to come, many more would be added, allocated to the appropriate century or placed in the Elysium. It is interesting to note that Winckelmann was the only foreigner commemorated in the museum, because of his importance to the history of art, the founding principle of Lenoir’s project. Lenoir would emphasise the celebratory tone of commemoration in his museum by including epitaphs on the pieces themselves and by composing eulogies in the catalogue. The most striking must have been the one to the painter Drouais, who had died tragically young in 1788 and whom Lenoir claimed as a friend. His bust was a copy of the original in Rome, where the artist was buried, and Lenoir wrote an excessively lyrical eulogy extending over four pages in the catalogue.57 Commemoration of great artists also occurred, of course, through display of their work. Although the first edition of the catalogue (1793) acknowledged very few artists, from the third edition (1797) onwards, Lenoir mentioned the artist’s name next to each piece and included a separate list of all featured artists. This covered three pages and listed nearly eighty names. The greatest artists of France were to be further celebrated as part of the unexecuted plan 30

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for the decoration of the three courts, which included the erection of a Corinthian colonnade with 19 niches, each bearing the bust of a great man of the arts and letters with a statue of Fame in the middle.58 The cult of personality at work in the Museum of Monuments found further expression in the personalisation of the original monuments in the collection. Since the passing of the Revolutionary rage against all things Ancien Régime, it became increasingly viable to consider prominent persons of the royalist past as actual characters, rather than abstract hate figures. François I, whose memory was meant to have been forgotten with his ashes, as Lenoir was proudly stating in 1794, found himself increasingly remembered as an enlightened ruler; and along with him, a considerable number of royal personal histories began to be woven into the greater narrative of the museum. These included the charismatic Diane de Poitiers, loved by both François I and Henri II, pious yet artistic and seductive; the talented Philippe d’Orléans, with an entire ballad of his printed by Lenoir in the later catalogues, to accompany his monument, and Charlemagne, in whose statue, claimed Lenoir, one saw simultaneously the man, the victorious hero and the savant legislator.59 Soon, new acquisitions were justified by Lenoir on the basis of the museum’s aim to represent national history through the stories of its illustrious personalities. Among the many examples, one of the most eloquent was the tomb of Chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital, from Étampes, which Lenoir proposed to acquire in May 1800. He wrote for permission to the Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte, with the following argument: The monument of this virtuous magistrate was made for a place in the museum I direct [my emphasis]. Who could look on coldly at the statue of l’Hôpital close to the tombs of the princes of Lorrain, the Medicis and the Valois, that this great man had courageously battled with so many times, to defend the interest of the people to whom he was like a father?60

The placement of de l’Hôpital next to those royals he conflicted with in pursuit of his championing the people was a perfect opportunity for the museum to emphasise its character as both historical narrative and celebration of great men – so much so that Lenoir felt compelled to say that the tomb was simply made for it. This argument must have been convincing enough for the minister, as he approved the transportation, which took place that summer. Similarly, in March 1803, Lenoir requested the tomb of Constable Olivier de Clisson ‘in order to reunite it, in the museum, with that of Du Guesclin, his friend and follower; it is there that the two monuments, placed next to that of Charles V, will acquire a new interest’.61 In his pursuit of historical personalities, Lenoir would often exchange other pieces already in the collection, which he considered ‘useless’ for the museum. The Mayor of Magny consented to the transportation of the Villeroy tombs to the Petits-Augustins in 1801, in exchange for a statue of the Virgin and two columns of black marble, to decorate the altar of the Saint-Gervais church. Lenoir was granted approval for this transaction, having stated that the sculptures in question were not contributing in any way to the museum.62 An earlier and most prominent such example was the portico of the château of Anet, residence of one of the most celebrated figures in the museum, Diane de Poitier. 31

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The château had suffered considerable damage during the Revolution, and its portico was one of the many fragments sold off in the mass auctions at the time. Lenoir located it and bought it in 1799, to place over the entrance of his museum – where, incidentally, it still remains today. The man who had previously bought it for the price of its stone was happy to exchange it for ‘twelve marble statues and other fragments of that nature, all objects of devotion [my emphasis]’, in Lenoir’s words. Minister of the Interior Quinette had agreed to the sale, and stated that the exchanged pieces were, indeed, ‘useless for the museum and without merit in the history of the arts’.63 Lanzac de Laborie recounts that, when the parish priest of the Petits-Pères requested the return of the statues of a Virgin and St Augustin to his church, in line with Napoleon’s recent policy of Church appeasement, Lenoir responded ‘with the greatest sang-froid in the world’ that the two statues were of no use to the arts, and had thus been already exchanged for a Diane de Poitiers.64 Vanuxem also lists a considerable number of pieces either sold or exchanged by Lenoir between 1795 and 1800, all of them ‘objects of devotion’, Christs, Virgins or saints, and not recognisably by an artist of note.65 The End – and After The second half of the museum’s life saw as much political turmoil as the first, with Napoleon’s coup in 1799, declaration of Empire in 1804, defeat and the brief restitution of the monarchy in 1814, followed by his Hundred Day return to power and final defeat in 1815. What remained relatively constant since the final chapter of the Revolution in 1799 was the mounting opposition to the Museum of Monuments by few yet prominent figures, who identified it with the regime of its inception and therefore summarily called for its closure. Lenoir responded by attempting to adapt the museum accordingly, though, crucially, this did not involve any significant changes to the collection. Mainly it involved changes to the introductory catalogue text, the various editions of which served as the museum’s manifesto as well as visitors’ guide. In addition to these, however, and as the pressure for closure increased, Lenoir did make some proposals for actual alterations to the museum’s structure. In 1811, he proposed the re-consecration of the former convent’s chapel and the installation of a chaplain on the premises to perform mass, so that the monuments could be viewed in a sacred environment. This was in response to the proposal of the Minister of the Interior of the same year, calling for the monuments to be transported to Saint-Denis in view of the greater appropriateness of that context to objects of worship.66 Subsequently, Lenoir also offered to change the name of the museum to sever all Revolutionary associations and to make casts of those of his monuments that were to be moved elsewhere, in an attempt to keep his project intact.67 These proposals can be interpreted as plain opportunism, but this is only part of the story. While Lenoir did not hesitate to rationalise his museum in perfectly conflicting ways, depending on whom he was trying to please, what remained consistent throughout was the nature of what he was offering: a representation of the French nation through a historical narrative set up by monuments. 32

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On 24 February 1811, expanding on the decree which had ordered the return of certain tombs to the re-Christianised Pantheon/Sainte-Geneviève, Minister Champagny decreed the closure of Lenoir’s museum and the transportation of the entirety of its funerary monuments to Saint-Denis. This proposal had the full backing of the Emperor, and it would appear that only an administrative error delayed its immediate implementation, the delay then being further extended because of political circumstances.68 On 17 May of the same year, Vivant-Denon, by then Director General of Museums, wrote a letter to Montalivet, the new Minister of the Interior, in support of the closure of the Museum of Monuments. He said that he rejoiced at the prospect of bringing to Saint-Denis, traditional burial place of kings now restored to worship, ‘that immense quantity of tombs of great families and illustrious men that we currently admire at the Museum of Monuments, such as Descartes, Corneille, Racine, Molière, etc.’, and that the place would then rival the cathedral of Westminster, ‘where the ashes of Newton rest in the same enclosure as the mortal remains of kings’.69 For the rest of the pieces from the Petits-Augustins – those not relevant for display in a church – Denon did not propose restitution, but instead, the inauguration of a hall of French sculptors in the Louvre. It is significant that, in the end, only few pieces were actually returned to Saint-Denis, where both objects and building were further ‘restored’ in a creative fashion, echoing Lenoir’s own fabrications and, ironically, deplored by contemporaries as an unworthy successor of the Petits-Augustins, while the gallery envisaged by Denon was indeed realised and claimed a much larger number of Lenoir’s monuments. With the Bourbons firmly reinstated after the Hundred Days, the decisive moment in the fate of the Museum of Monuments was the appointment of Quatremère de Quincy as Perpetual Secretary of the Academy in early 1816. Being perhaps the single most eloquent and erudite opponent of the museum, outspoken against it since 1800, he did not hesitate to act immediately upon admission to office. He was behind, and probably dictated, the two decrees which sealed the museum’s fate: the one of 14 April 1816, ordering the immediate restitution of all monuments to their churches and to the various families they had originally belonged to, and that of 18 October, giving the building over to the École des Beaux-Arts (‘School of Fine Arts’). What is important to highlight at this stage is that, throughout the process of the museum’s closure, a more or less similar project was envisaged in its place. In other words, some kind of ‘museum of monuments’ was seen as a necessary successor of the institution about to be closed. Whether in the Louvre, in another fifteenth-century hall, or at Saint-Denis-turned-Westminster, the idea was that the kind of grouping which Lenoir had first introduced made perfect sense. Even Minister Champagny’s seemingly worship-oriented argument was largely ‘musealised’, requiring that the monuments Lenoir had brought together from numerous churches should actually stay together, to continue receiving the ‘public admiration’ they had commanded as a ‘magnificent spectacle’ in the Petits-Augustins.70 Furthermore, the initial decree, which Champagny was elaborating on, already stated that reinstated pieces should be arranged ‘in the order of centuries’, accepting the principle of chronology as essential to any such collection. In other words, even as Lenoir’s project was being closed, museums and galleries of 33

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national monuments that were to emulate it throughout the nineteenth century were being envisaged. The Museum of Cluny, founded in 1834, headed the list of such projects. It was created by the antiquarian Alexandre du Sommerard, initially from his personal collection of loosely defined medieval artefacts, and housed in his fifteenth-century home in the Latin Quarter, the hôtel de Cluny. It was directly influenced by the Petits-Augustins, as openly acknowledged by the founder, who lamented its closure, while also, ironically, acknowledging Quatremère de Quincy for his contribution to the study of such historic artefacts. To further emphasise the direct lineage of the two projects, Lenoir’s son, Albert, who had trained as an architect, was principal assistant to the project and drew up plans for the display of the collection, borrowing several of his father’s ideas as pioneered at the Petits-Augustins.71 The Baron Prosper de Barante, on the occasion of the Cluny museum’s inauguration, indicated the extent of the debt to Alexandre Lenoir, stating that this project replaces the museum of the Petits-Augustins, which was wrongly suppressed.72 All this was undoubtedly a much-longed for vindication for Lenoir, who died five years later on 11 June 1839. Barante’s comments were not the only praise Lenoir was to receive after his own museum’s closure, as several prominent writers and scholars, including Augustin Thierry, Jules Michelet, and the Baron Isidor Taylor, were to continue acknowledging their debt to this pioneering project well after Lenoir’s death.73 Lenoir’s contribution to the arts had already been recognised – having become a minor authority on the Gothic, publishing and lecturing on the subject – but was now complete, with the public affirmation that it had been a mistake to close his magnum opus in the first place. Already a decade before Cluny, however, in 1824, Denon’s vision of a ‘Gothic’ gallery at the Louvre was realised by his successor, the Count de Forbin. Eighty-four pieces from the Petits-Augustins were arranged in five rooms that composed the Angoulême gallery. The collection was then further augmented with medieval and Renaissance pieces bought individually from various sources.74 Lenoir also lived to see King Louis-Philippe’s decision to convert the palace of Versailles into a museum of national history, decreed in 1833, where several pieces remaining in the abandoned Petits-Augustins were transferred, and where artists were commissioned to paint episodes that Lenoir himself had attempted to invoke in the halls of his museum, such as the baptism of the legendary King Clovis, the entry of Charles VIII into Naples, and so on.75 The influence of the Museum of French Monuments was profound, and the above three institutions were only the first examples from a long list of projects constituting its legacy, to be discussed in the final chapter of this book. Considering the passionate rhetoric for its closure, however, the process of dismantling the Petits-Augustins was a real anticlimax. Although the immediate reinstatement of the monuments to their places of origin was the essential reason for the museum’s urgent suppression, it never quite happened. Except for the small number of monuments promptly taken to SaintDenis and the new Père Lachaise cemetery, major administrative conflicts, indecision and confusion kept considerable parts of the collection on site for twenty-five years. The demolition of most of the old convent and its replacement by the new Beaux-Arts 34

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building started very tentatively in May 1820, with the architect François Debret in charge. Eventually, only the old church with Lenoir’s addition of the Anet façade, the Chapel des Louanges, the sacristy and part of the cloister were to survive. But it was not until 1832, when Durban took over the project, that the actual halls of the former museum began to be demolished and the new edifice began to take shape. In fact, until that date, the Petits-Augustins continued to be visited by the curious and interested as the remains of the Museum of Monuments. Upon the commencement of Debret’s works in 1819, and well after 1832, a large part of the collection remained on site, piled into the courtyards, making a mockery of the whole rhetoric for the museum’s closure. Among the many who deplored the situation, the Baron Ferdinand de Guilhermy was the most eloquent: he visited the site and lamented the ruinous condition of the monuments, thrown ‘like rubble stones’ in the open, exposed to the elements. Whereas once these pieces were salvaged in order to display the creative progress of time, he wrote, now they were senselessly abandoned to its destructive powers.76 The majority of pieces from the original Museum of Monuments found their way to other museums. But even the limited returns to churches and cemeteries were mere gestures of reinstatement, since the situation to which the monuments were ‘returning’ was fundamentally altered. Several of Lenoir’s fabriques were moved to the relatively new Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaise in 1817, including the cenotaphs of Molière and La Fontaine, whose remains were already there, and most famously, the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard, a move that purportedly added to the popularity of the place, which was already becoming a visitor attraction for the celebrity of its residents and curiosity of its monuments. Réau discusses in 1.5  Entrance to the introductory hall of the Museum of some detail the confusion Monuments, as it survives today 35

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1.6  Tombs of La Fontaine (left) and Molière, designed by Alexandre Lenoir, at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, Paris

involved in the transfers from the Petits-Augustins, painting an evocative picture of the uncertainty of the operation and its consequences. Contemporary witnesses confirmed that the much-advertised reinstatement was a shambles.77 The Comte de Montalembert, for example, wrote that rather than returning to Saint-Denis all of the pieces taken from it, royal tombs from all over the country were amassed there instead. The abbey, he complained, had been turned into ‘a veritable museum of bricà-brac’, full of innumerable anachronisms and pieces that did not belong to it. And he concluded in exasperation by asking whether this was why the Museum of Monuments was dismantled in the first place.78 This poignant remark summed up the situation, highlighting the essential turn heralded by the Museum of Monuments and by no means expired with it. Saint-Denis and Sainte-Geneviève, Père Lachaise, the Louvre and Versailles were all becoming museums, an essential transformation in the context of major cultural changes and new sensibilities. Before concluding this chapter, it is important to discuss two aspects of the museum’s history that shed further light on its character and significance: a series of transfer proposals for the project made by various interested parties throughout its life, and the numerous publications accompanying the museum by its founder and curator.

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1.7  Tomb of Héloïse and Abélard, designed by Alexandre Lenoir, at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, Paris

Transfer Proposals Already in July 1796, less than a year after its official opening, Minister of the Interior Bénézech had received a proposal from the architect Biarez to transfer the Museum of Monuments to Notre Dame de Paris. Biarez, a government surveyor of monuments, criticised the current location at the Petits-Augustins as a ‘too restricted and altogether inappropriate’ exhibition space. The great cathedral of Notre Dame, he argued, was a more imposing space in terms of both history and spatial configuration, and thus better suited for hosting such a museum. The significance of a national museum of monuments was strongly emphasised in Biarez’s proposal. Further on, he wrote that the commemoration and celebration of great men of the nation was an act indistinguishable from the exercise of the people’s liberty, and therefore such a museum was a credit to the Republic. However, the commemorative aspect of the museum was not all. Biarez confirmed Lenoir’s thesis that such a visual history of French art was very important for the education of artists. The transfer of the museum to Notre Dame would be especially beneficial for those coming to study the monuments, as they would have much more space and light to compare the works successfully than at the Petits-Augustins. Bénézech had to reject Biarez’s proposal on the grounds of cost. It is important to note that he otherwise approved of it, and implied that, had the financial constraints not been in place, he would have decreed it.79 Four years later, in February 1800, the Council for Civil Buildings received a proposal by Joseph Bonet, former member of the National Convention, which recaptured the 37

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main principles behind Biarez’s earlier proposal. Like Biarez, Bonet began by praising Lenoir for the chronological display of the museum, but found the buildings of the former depot too restricting for the appreciation of the collection. Bonet, however, also disapproved of Lenoir’s ‘theatrical’ gestures regarding the decoration of the halls and cloisters, and he argued that the interior of Notre Dame would offer a more appropriately majestic and noble setting with a simple, unified layout. If we are seized by admiration upon entry to the cathedral as it stands today, he wrote, imagine what amazement would await us if it were to be transformed into a magnificent museum. Bonet’s proposal went on to give details of the arrangement of the monuments in the cathedral following the chronological principle, but also placing great emphasis on the unity of the spectacle.80 The reply from the council, in the person of Petit-Radel, was somewhat different to the one Biarez had received from the minister for his very similar proposal four years earlier. Petit-Radel did not actually approve of Notre Dame as a potential setting for a museum of French monuments, finding it too large and daunting a space for this purpose. Instead, he suggested the church of Saint-Sulpice as more appropriate, with its pleasant proportions, its ample light and its ‘pleasant disposition’.81 The matter, however, was not taken any further. During 1800, there were two more proposals for the transfer of the Museum of Monuments. The first was by a Fontanes, again favouring Notre Dame, and similarly getting no further than its initial submission to the relevant authorities. This proposal recaptured the theme of the museum as place of commemoration and celebration of the great men of the nation.82 The second proposal in the same year was to become a cause of great upset for Lenoir. It came from a certain Norvins, and had managed to gain the backing of the Minister of the Interior, at the time the First Consul’s brother, Lucien Bonaparte. Norvins proposed the transportation of the entire collection of the museum to the gardens of Mousseaux in Paris, where the monuments would be strewn along natural scenery, in order to form a vast sculptural park. Lenoir, having gained the support of various ‘men of taste’ argued in vain the enormity of the expense (more than 8 million livres, when the entire annual budget for the museum had been less than 20,000) and the risks of the move. Lucien decreed the transfer in October 1800, asking Lenoir to prepare the plans for the Musée de Mousseaux. This favourable assignment, however, did not abate Lenoir’s opposition to the project. So, when Lucien departed suddenly for Madrid to take up the Spanish throne, Lenoir renewed his protests to the First Consul, and finally succeeded in saving the museum at the Petits-Augustins. In February 1801, Chaptal, the new Minister of the Interior, cancelled Lucien’s decree, invoking financial reasons.83 Lenoir, as expected, saw all of these transfer proposals as a threat, not only because he had already invested heavily in the building, but also because he felt that such a drastic change might marginalise him and reduce his control over what he saw very much as his personal project. However, although the proposals expressed discontent with the Petits-Augustins as exhibition space, their most significant implication was the full endorsement of the concept of such a museum. Beyond the direct acknowledgement of the debt to Lenoir, or the critique of some of his choices, the importance of the complete acceptance of the institution as such cannot be overemphasised. Until just 38

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over a decade earlier, the possibility of such a museum was hardly conceivable. Even when vandalism emerged as the great issue against which the Museum of Monuments was defined, there was still major uncertainty about the overall responsibilities and character of such an institution. With this in mind, it was a key moment in the history of museums when Lenoir’s project acquired autonomy, with a creative role in the developing identity of the nation through the representation of history. Beyond this significant acceptance of the need for a museum of monuments in the first place, what further emerges from the transfer proposals is that such a museum’s ideal character was identified with the specific project at the Petits-Augustins. The main aspects of the museum, as outlined in the proposals, were effectively reiterations of Lenoir’s agenda. The chronological arrangement of the display with the possibility of an overview of the entire collection for the articulation of a history of the arts and the education of artists, and the appropriately atmospheric setting for the commemoration and celebration of great men of the nation were also Lenoir’s primary concerns. Although the curator was thinking in more immediate terms and was therefore justified in his opposition to a transfer of the museum, the greater implications of those proposals were a compliment to his efforts and vision, and a confirmation of the museum’s significance. The Catalogues Alongside the development of the Museum of Monuments, Lenoir was working on the numerous editions of its catalogue, which soon acquired importance in its own right. Lenoir was by no means original in the production of such publications, as this was already a trend for collections at the time. Nevertheless, the contents, arrangement and overall character of the museum’s catalogue in its multiple editions suggest an enhanced significance of this device for Lenoir. Far from a mere compilation of dates and facts, Lenoir used the catalogues as a manifesto of his philosophy of the museum and a political tool for ensuring the project’s survival under constantly changing regimes. In January 1797, the first edition of the catalogue since the official recognition of the museum appeared. This was the third overall edition of the document, which Lenoir had been producing since the depot years of his project. Entitled Description historique et chronologique des monumens de sculpture, réunis au Musée des Monumens français (‘Historical and chronological description of the monuments of sculpture, collected at the Museum of French Monuments’), it comprised 240 pages and was more than twice the length of the preceding edition, the Notice historique of just over a year earlier. It is here that the complete chronological sequencing of the collection made its appearance for the first time. Although only two of the halls had taken shape in the museum itself, those of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, the entire text was arranged according to the envisaged plan: first appeared the Roman antiquities, important even in their absence, being already transported to the Louvre; these were followed by the handful of ‘Celtic and Medieval’ pieces, and then by each century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth. Most significantly, this was the edition where the numbering of the entries became standardised, a feat Lenoir did not fail to advertise. It is interesting to 39

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note that even when the introductory hall was set up as an overview of all centuries, the selection of pieces which adorned it remained numbered and ordered in the catalogue according to their period – that is, they were still listed with the monuments of the relevant century, despite not actually featuring in the corresponding halls. The catalogue’s introductory sections, the Preface and Introduction, were to become increasingly expansive and important to Lenoir for the presentation of his views on all matters relating to the museum. In the first edition of the Description historique, the importance of ‘the chronological principle’ had taken over from the issue of vandalism as the main aim of the exhibition. In the Preface, Minister Bénézech was credited as a primary supporter of this ‘rational scheme’, which Lenoir had been advocating in the first place. In the ten-page Introduction, which was expanded to 34 pages by the eighth edition of the catalogue, the key ideas of Lenoir’s theory of history were presented. As Édouard Pommier points out, this was the mainstream theory of a cyclical development of the time, where the ‘great centuries’ represented the perfection of the past, with Classical Greece as archetype and the hope for the future.84 Lenoir began the history of France by identifying under the name ‘Celts’ the fabled ancestors who came onto French soil after travelling far and wide in the world through a spirit of conquest. The Celtic druids, influenced by Egyptian priests in a number of ways, were responsible for those first monuments, with a character ‘sacred and uniform, like that of the Egyptians’. Largely following Winckelmann’s model, Lenoir proposed Hadrian as the ruler who ‘placed art on the throne’, responsible for one of the first major civilising influences on France. The advent of Christianity was the next one, with Clovis the legendary first Christian ruler. This development was encouraging for the arts, though it was also responsible for massive destruction of monuments of Antiquity. Charlemagne and Frédégonde were singled out within that early period as important rulers for the arts. With the death of the latter, the artists apparently fell into inaction under a series of indolent rulers ‘solely occupied with their own pleasure’. After the Crusades, the ‘Arab’ style became dominant, bringing an unprecedented wealth of colours, ornaments and mystical emblems to French art. The progress between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries was dramatic, building up to the Renaissance of the sixteenth century. Although the fourteenth century still offered an ‘arid’ design with ‘insipid expressions’ on the sculpted figures, the fifteenth century had already achieved a ‘grand and sophisticated execution’, with ‘Gothicism’ rapidly disappearing. The tomb of Louis XII, the centrepiece of the museum’s fifteenth-century hall, manifested according to Lenoir how ‘the art of the period started to emerge from childhood and acquire a more accomplished form’. Still, French art paled in comparison to Italy, where Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were ‘stunning the universe’. This situation was to change with the advent of the sixteenth century and the enlightened rule of François I, under whose patronage the genius of such fabled artists as Germain Pilon, Philibert de l’Orme and the three Jeans – Bullant, Goujon and Cousin – were to bring about the French Renaissance. Immediately after this peak, however, came a steep degradation, due both to inherently artistic reasons and socio-political ones. The balance between the two, and thus the exact pitch of the role of Louis XIV, did vary across regimes in the catalogues – most notably in the first 1815 edition, celebrating the restitution of 40

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the Bourbons, where the causes of artistic decline were almost exclusively attributed to the artists themselves rather than the context of absolutist monarchy. At the same time, Lenoir always identified during the reign of Louis XIV certain beneficial influences to the arts, such as Colbert, ‘the French Maecenas’, a great patron. Nevertheless, these were not enough to prevent the inevitable. The decline of style that had begun under Vouet and Le Brun in the closed circles of the academies was exacerbated during the reign of Louis XV, when ‘Van Loo and Boucher became apostles of a taste so depraved that art and its education fell into a total degradation.’ But as the main principle of this historiography was cyclical, the future for France could not have been more promising. Lenoir waxed lyrical over the brilliant careers opening up for contemporary painters and sculptors, who, infused with the philosophical spirit of the age, would seek truth in their work, and would thus eventually outshine even their most illustrious predecessors, the ancient Greeks.85 What is most interesting about Lenoir’s quite mainstream take on history is its adaptability. The cyclical theory rationalised the prediction of a golden near future and presented an account of history that would suit any regime. Furthermore, the determinist linking of art and state worked both ways, so any regime that could show an interest in the arts, successfully promoting individuals and institutions, would be making its mark as an enlightened and therefore legitimate state. Another important innovation of the first Description, compared to the previous two editions of the catalogue, was the presence of a list of artists featured in the museum, placed between the Preface and the Introduction. Although a number of works remained anonymous due to lack of information, the decision to draw attention to those artists who were known was significant. The emphasis of the museum was still, at the time, on the collective historical/ stylistic relevance of the display. The objects composing it were not seen as possessing independent ‘artistic value’, since all items that did were claimed by the Louvre. Lenoir’s gesture towards the recognition of individual artistic creativity behind each work in his museum was a significant step towards the eventual aesthetic legitimisation of the sculptures. Naming the creators of the monuments wherever possible was to remain an important feature of the catalogues and a constitutive part of the commemorative agenda of the museum. Until the closure of the museum in 1816, there were nine more editions of the catalogue: in Revolutionary years VI (1798), VIII (1800), X (1802), XI (1803), XII (1806), 1810, two in 1815, and the final one in 1816. Their overall structure largely followed that of the first Description, but there were some additions and modifications. It was not until the fifth edition of the catalogue (1800) that the description of each hall made its appearance, heading the listing of the relevant monuments. These increasingly extended sections linked a more specific historical interpretation of each century, after the more general narrative of the Introduction, with a description of the decor of the actual hall. Perhaps the most significant modification from one edition to another related to the changes of regime, of which there were no less than six during the short life of the museum. Three of these occurred during the year before the museum’s closure, which saw an equal number of catalogue editions appearing in rapid succession. The first 1815 edition, in the first three months of the year, celebrated the recent restoration 41

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of the Bourbon monarchy and was dedicated by Lenoir to ‘the protection of a beloved, regenerator King’. All mentions of Napoleon were removed, and there were several pages of notes added at the end, with further comments on key royal monuments in the collection. This edition had to be withdrawn in haste after 20 March, when Napoleon returned to power for the Hundred Days. All references to the monarchy were duly removed from the second 1815 edition, and the opening Editor’s Observations became an extended eulogy of Napoleon. The acknowledgement of the king’s support changed to that of ‘an enlightened and mighty government’. Furthermore, in the heading of this edition, Lenoir had replaced his own newly acquired and much awaited title of chevalier, conferred to him by the king, with the more prosaic ‘conservator of art at Malmaison’, a reminder of Lenoir’s earlier close relationship with the Empire. Finally, in 1816, a virtual reprint of the first 1815 edition appeared, to mark the second reinstatement of the Bourbons. Lenoir was extremely keen to show his project as perpetually topical. It is true that these modifications were aimed at ingratiating the project with the various authorities. But rather than thinking of them as mere opportunism, it would be more accurate to see them as part of the greater effort to accentuate the museum’s relevance and importance across regimes, for the whole nation and its people throughout history, regardless of contingencies. Two more innovative features of the catalogue, which were present in most editions, are worth mentioning here. The first is the inclusion of anecdotal material for the personalities represented by the monuments, if they were available and if the times allowed for attention to be drawn on them. As expected, this practice flourished after the Revolutionary decade, when it was no longer dangerous to address the royal associations of historical figures. Nevertheless, already in the first Description (1797) Lenoir had begun exercising this project of personalisation, through the inclusion of such material for some of the less controversial figures, like the young painter Drouais, discussed earlier. The second innovative feature of the catalogues was the inclusion of various treatises and informative appendices, analysing issues of stained glass painting, historical costume and the changing fashions of the beard, as well as including the whole report on the Saint-Denis exhumations in some editions. This became standard practice from the Notice historique (1795). Lenoir wrote on the catalogue’s importance: This small work that we offer ought to serve as guide to the friend of the arts who wishes to visit our Museum. Without it, he will only be able to experience a sterile admiration, while with it he will be able to expand his ideas, to give himself over to sublime meditations and to draw from the noble enthusiasm that inspires the true, the good and the beautiful.86

It is clear that Lenoir thought of these publications as much more than mere records. Between the philosophic-historical exposition of the introductory sections, interpreting French art from Clovis to Drouais via the Goths and the Sarrazins, the increasing emphasis on the personalities represented by the monuments, including the artists thereof, the evocatively descriptive texts for each hall and century and the various additional treatises, the catalogues were meant to enhance and expand the visitors’ experience, in order to encourage them to discover no less than ‘the true, the good and the beautiful’. 42

a history

Lenoir’s desire to produce a largely independent publication, which would communicate the museum’s agenda beyond the museum itself, was most clearly manifested in a separate publication project, entitled Musée des Monumens français ou Description historique et chronologique des statues en marbre et en bronze, bas-reliefs et tombeaux des hommes et des femmes célèbres, pour servir à l’histoire de France et à celle de l’art, ornée de gravures et augmentée d’une dissertation sur le costume de chaque siècle, par Alexandre Lenoir, fondateur et administrateur du Musée (‘Museum of French Monuments or historical and chronological description of the statues in marble and bronze, reliefs and tombs of famous men and women, to serve the history of France and of art, illustrated with engravings and enriched with a dissertation on the costumes of each century, by Alexandre Lenoir, founder and administrator of the Museum’). Independent of the 12 editions of the catalogue and concurrent with them, with a misleadingly similar title, this was an illustrated description of the museum, including drawings by Lenoir and others, such as his regular collaborator Percier. Overlapping considerably with the catalogue, it was interspersed with what Courajod called ‘numerous digressions in the history of art’.87 The real emphasis, however, was on the images, which attempted to reproduce something of the experience of the museum in print. Lenoir began these publications under the title Collection des Monumens de sculpture réunis au Musée des Monumens français (‘Collection of the monuments of sculpture gathered in the Museum of French Monuments’) in instalments, the first appearing in December 1797 and the second in May 1798. The publication was interrupted after six instalments, having reached 72 pages with approximately 20 illustrations. Lenoir picked up his idea again in 1800, adopting the Musée title, starting again with the first volume of what was to become a series of eight, the final volume published in 1821, five years after the closure of the actual museum. Notes 1 Inventaire général des richesses d’art de la France (hereafter AMMF), vol. III, p. 148 2 Henri Stein, ‘Le peintre G.F. Doyen et l’origine du Musée des Monuments français’ (Paris, 1888). 3 AMMF, vol. II, p. 39. 4 Letter to Commission des monuments, n.d., AN F17/1036, dossier 3. 5 AMMF, vol. I, p. 12. 6 Ibid., vol. III, p. 153. 7 See, for example, MS, Archives du Louvre, Z2: 1793. 8 Louis Tuetey, Procès-verbaux de la Commission des Monuments, vol. I (Paris, 1902), pp. xliv–xlv. 9 AN F17*3/24, fol. 55. 10 AMMF, vol. I, p.11. 11 Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 Eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, 1994), p. 162. 12 AMMF, vol. II, p. 59. 13 Louis Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir. Son journal et le Musée des Monuments Français, 3 vols (Paris, 1878– 87), vol. II, p. 208. 14 Lenoir’s account is reproduced in ibid., vol. I, pp. 87–91. 15 Ibid., vol. II, p. 5. 16 AMMF, vol. II, pp. 169–70. 17 Lenoir, Notice succincte, p.12. 18 AMMF, vol. I, p. 19. 19 Ibid., vol. II, p. 202. 20 Ibid., vol. I, p. 26. 21 Lenoir, Essai sur le Muséum de peinture (Paris, 1794), pp. 6–12. 22 McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, pp. 155–97. 23 AMMF, vol. I, pp. 22–31. 24 Ibid., p. vii. 25 AMMF, vol. I, pp. 22 and 34; Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir, vol. I, p. 90. 26 Ibid., p. 160. 27 Ibid., pp. 162–3. 28 AMMF, vol. II, pp. 305–6. 29 Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir, vol. I, p. 165–7. 30 La Décade, vol. IV, nivôse–ventôse year III, pp. 213. 31 Description, year V, pp. 1–2; also in all the subsequent editions. 32 Lenoir’s letter to the minister was co-signed by Peyre in his official capacity as architect to the museum; AN F13 871, dossier 1 (26 prairial year V). 33 Mary Berry, Voyages de Miss Berry à Paris, 1782–1836 (Paris, 1905), entry for 25 March 1802, p. 59. 34 AMMF, vol. I, pp. 390–93. 35 Ibid., p. 383. 36 MS, Archives du Louvre, Z 62–3. 37 Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme: Les monuments détruits de l’art français, 2 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1959), vol. I, pp. 394–5. 38 Description historique, year VIII, p. 8. 39 Ibid., p. 195. 40 Lenoir, Compte rendu sur l’état actuel du Musée des monumens français (year VIII), pp. 7–8; AMMF, vol. I, pp. 154–7.

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a history 41 Ibid., p. 155. 42 Ibid., p. 158. 43 Ibid., pp. 188–9, 238–40, 245–6, 251–2. 44 Ibid., vol. III, pp. 17–20. 45 Léon de Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, VIII: Spectacles et musées (Paris, 1913), p. 354; see also AMMF, vol. III, pp. 221–36, for a summary of all the objects removed from the depot/museum between 1792 and 1817. 46 Ibid., vol. I, p. 317. 47 Ibid., pp. 316, 328 and 411. 48 Ibid., pp. 364 and 387; ibid., vol. III, p. 109; on Lenoir’s involvement at the Malmaison, see AdolpheMathurin de Lescure, Le château de la Malmaison (Paris, 1867), and Gérard Hubert, ‘Josephine, a Discerning Collector of Sculpture’, Apollo ( July 1977), pp. 34–43. 49 AMMF, vol. I, p. 191. 50 A number of catalogue entries include more than one actual piece, most frequently in the case of architectural fragments, such as the columns of a chapel, or sculptural figures from a broken relief, which are listed in groups. Lenoir’s choice of counting these pieces as one exhibit has been followed here, too. 51 AMMF, vol. I, p. 24. 52 Ibid., p. 141. 53 Ibid., vol. II, p. 427. 54 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 160–63 and 432–3. 55 Ibid., pp. 323–4 and 415. 56 Notice historique year IV, at no. 314. 57 At no. 355 of the catalogue from the third edition, the first Description, year V (1797), onwards. 58 Lenoir, Compte rendu, p. 6. 59 Description historique, year VIII, p. 183; and Lenoir, Compte rendu, p. 2. 60 AMMF, vol. I, p. 174. 61 Ibid., pp. 306. 62 Ibid., pp. 251–2. 63 Ibid., p. 153. 64 Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon pp. 347–8. 65 Jacques Vanuxem, ‘La sculpture religieuse au Musée des monuments français’, excerpt of unpublished PhD dissertation submitted in 1937, in Positions des thèses soutenues par les anciens élèves de l’École du Louvre 1911–1944 (Paris, 1956), pp. 200–203. 66 AMMF, vol. I, p. 405. 67 Ibid., pp. 438–9.

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 68 Ibid., p. 405; AN F IV 4126. 69 Lanzac de Laborie, Paris sous Napoléon, vol. VIII, p. 359. 70 AMMF, vol. I, p. 405. 71 Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT, 1993), p. 249. 72 Dominique Poulot, ‘Alexandre Lenoir et les Musées des Monuments français’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, II: La nation (Paris, 1986), pp. 524. 73 Haskell, History and its Images, p. 250; Réau, Histoire du vandalisme, vol. II, pp. 80–85. 74 Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, ‘La Dispersion du musée des Monuments français, des églises à la galerie d’Angoulême’, Romantisme, revue du XIXe siècle, XXIV/84 (1994), pp. 124–48. 75 Haskell, History and its Images, p. 281; Jaap Harskamp, ‘Renaissance and Renovation: The Influence of Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français, 1795–1816’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 136/1,580 (2000), pp. 103–8. 76 Ferdinand Baron de Guilhermy, ‘Musée de sculpture au Louvre’, Annales archéologiques, XII (1852) p. 18. 77 Réau, Histoire du vandalisme, vol. II, pp. 70ff. 78 Charles Forbes, Comte de Montalembert, Mélanges d’Art et de Littérature (Paris, 1861) pp. 289–93. 79 AMMF, vol. I, pp. 52–4. 80 AN F13 507, pluviôse year VIII. 81 Ibid., 12 floréal year VIII. 82 AMMF, vol. I, p. 185. 83 Ibid., pp. 194–205 and 227. 84 Édouard Pommier, L’art de la liberté: Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française (Paris, 1991), pp. 374–6. 85 Description, year V, Introduction. 86 This first appeared in the Notice historique (1795), p. viii, and thereafter in all subsequent catalogue editions. 87 Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir, vol. II, p. 214.

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2 A Visit

The Museum The history of the Museum of Monuments in the previous chapter shows that the project was in a state of development throughout its life. As a result, visitors at different periods would have encountered some variation in the number and kind of exhibits displayed, and in the accompanying catalogues. However, it is fair to say that the experience of the place, down to considerable detail, would not have been much altered, especially from the later years of the Revolutionary period onwards. The following ‘visit’ takes some variation into account, but aims above all to convey an impression, based on key ideas and aspects of the project, rather than offer an exhaustive depiction at any one time. A visitor coming to the Museum of Monuments would have followed the same route as a layperson coming to worship at the church of the old convent. At number 14 rue de Petite-Seine, on the left bank of Paris, a gate opened onto a small court, beyond which extended the main residential part of the convent, behind a colonnade. Immediately to the right of this court was the entrance to the church, intended to allow easy access of the devout to their place of worship without crossing into the monastic part of the compound. This doorway, with the later superimposition of the façade from Anet by Lenoir, was also the main entrance to the museum, opening directly into the introductory hall. According to Lenoir, this was the most interesting space in the whole museum, and the first of its kind in Europe, as it brought together under one roof masterpieces of the most celebrated French sculptors throughout the centuries, thus being both useful for the arts and the study of history, and a glorious spectacle for the enjoyment of the public.1 Having received the minister’s approval for the creation of this hall in 1797, Lenoir submitted to the Council for Buildings a more detailed proposal in October of that year. A portico with four columns supporting an ‘Egyptian pyramid’ was to be added to the understated entrance of the former church. Inside, the construction of 16 large columns along the walls would create niches for the placement of sculptures, as well as for doorways to the cloister, which flanked the length of the hall on the southwest. The hall was to be further adorned with pediments, cornices and the installation of stained glass in the windows; the roof timbers would also be decorated.2 The council approved the proposal in its entirety, except for the plan for the portico, 47

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2.1  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, façade of the château d’Anet at the museum entrance, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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2.2  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, plan of the Museum of French Monuments, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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which was abandoned. No alternative was constructed at the time, but in 1802 Lenoir transported an ornate wall from the château of Anet, which he planted over the main entrance, giving the museum an appropriately grand façade. The monuments in the introductory hall covered the whole chronological range of the museum, from the precious antique pieces – which Lenoir had to forward to the Louvre eventually, but continued to list in the catalogue because of their key role as ‘archetypes’ – to contemporary busts and reliefs. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries featured prominently, with some of the larger and most impressive pieces. Being the former church, this was the largest and tallest space in the building, and Lenoir’s decorative interventions clearly aimed to accentuate the uplifting character of the display. The great marble monuments of the Renaissance played a significant role in the setting of the visual tone of the hall. The overview of French art from its origins to the present was executed more as a celebratory vista, a dazzling composition, rather than as a didactic sequence. It is significant that, despite Lenoir’s initial proposal for a chronological arrangement of the pieces in this hall, he never actually executed it. Instead, the monuments were arranged for maximum visual effect, offering interesting comparisons and juxtapositions. Here is an example of such an eclectic arrangement: a fragment from a Roman altar to Jupiter from the reign of Tiberius, found under Notre Dame of Paris, was placed next to the statue of legendary King Clovis and Queen Clotilde of the sixth century, adjoining Lenoir’s fabrique to Queen Blanche from the

2.3  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, introductory hall, first view, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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thirteenth century, and topped by a contemporary relief of the miracle of St Philip from the portal of the saint’s church in Roule. Generally, Lenoir invested in the aesthetic experience of the whole to carry the conceptual significance of the display, rather than laying it out in a literal, encyclopaedic way. This was one of the most consistent principles across the museum, but nowhere more obvious than in the introductory hall and the Elysium. In the introductory hall, the visitor would have encountered the seventeenth-century tomb of Richelieu by Girardon, famous for being the piece that had caused Lenoir’s much-celebrated injury when he was trying to protect it from the revolutionaries sacking the chapel of the Sorbonne. At 14 feet long, in white marble, it represented the dying cardinal in the arms of Sorrow, with the figures of Religion and History mourning on either side. Also from the seventeenth century was the mausoleum of Mazarin by Coysevox. The life-size figures of Fidelity, Prudence and Abundance, in bronze, were seated at the base of the marble cenotaph, which bore the cardinal’s statue. Four pieces representing the sixteenth century in this hall are also worth a mention: the elaborate funerary column and urn containing the hearts of Henri II and Catherine de Medici, carried by the celebrated Three Graces by Germain Pilon; the tomb of Constable Anne de Montmorency and his wife by Bullant; the monument to Diane de Poitier; and the tomb of François I. The latter occupied the position of honour in what had been the Chapelle des Louanges, a hexagonal chapel opening off the east wall of the old church.

2.4  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, introductory hall, second view, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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2.5  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, introductory hall, showing the arched tomb of Reine Blanche, the statues of Clovis and Clotilde, various Roman fragments and the relief of St Philip hanging on the wall, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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Three of those monuments were Lenoir’s famous fabriques and will be discussed in greater length shortly. Earlier centuries did not have much of a presence in the introductory hall, being considered eras noted for their decorative style rather than any individual masterpieces. Conversely, it was the three halls dedicated to these centuries (thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth) that were by far the most atmospheric and meticulously decorated in the museum, aiming to convey the character of each century as a complete ambiance. Still, for the sake of the overview, there were some distinctive pieces from these more

2.6  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, introductory hall, tomb of Richelieu, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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‘primitive’ epochs in the introductory hall, such as the tomb of Pierre d’Orgemont, chancellor to Charles V, from the fourteenth century, and the tomb of Queen Blanche, from the thirteenth. Also, the few but highly prized ‘ancient archetypes and Celtic monuments’ were here, for as long as they were held by the museum. The antique pieces, 21 in total, were mainly smaller architectural fragments in marble, funerary stele and a variety of bas-reliefs. They were largely Roman, with just a few Greek pieces, whose inscriptions Lenoir meticulously copied and analysed in the catalogue.

2.7  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, introductory hall, showing (anticlockwise) the tomb of Anne de Montmorency, the monument to Michel de l’Hôpital, and a weeping figure from the tomb of Richelieu, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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The celebratory overview of the introductory hall provided an ideal context for Lenoir’s creative restorations, several of which were to be found here. The tomb of Constable Anne de Montmorency and his wife by Bullant had lost its original bronze statues of the couple to the foundry, but Lenoir promptly replaced them with a group of allegorical figures in white marble representing Charity and the Apostles, from the château of Anet. The monument to Chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital, having lost some of its original statuary, now featured replacements in the form of a kneeling statue from the church at Chamouteux and two others by Pilon from Saint-André-des-Arts. For further effect, Lenoir added to the composition a bust of the chancellor’s son and a bas-relief of the Judgement of Solomon at the base. In this hall was also displayed probably the most extensive of Lenoir’s fabrications, the monument to Queen Blanche of Castille, composed entirely of disparate sculptural debris. The two most imposing of Lenoir’s fabrications in this hall, however, were the monuments to Diane de Poitier and the tomb of François I. Diane de Poitier’s composition featured a kneeling statue of the noblewoman at the top of a black marble sarcophagus – the former being originally placed in front of her prie-dieu in the chapel of her château at Anet. Next to it, Lenoir placed the sculpture

2.8  Jean-Lubin Vauzelle, The Great Hall of the Museum of French Monuments, showing the monument to Diane de Poitier in the foreground, c. 1820, Musée Carnavalet, Paris © Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

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of a little dog, symbol of fidelity, and a figure of Eros seated on a pile of books, writing her history. Between the sarcophagus carrying the sculptures and the pedestal, he placed four sphinx heads, symbols of the eternal mystery of femininity and wisdom. Enamel portraits of François I and Henri II, the most prominent men in her life, were also added. The composition was supported by four wooden caryatides by Germain Pilon, originally from the reliquary of Sainte-Geneviève.

2.9  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, tomb of François I in the Chapelle des Louanges, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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Considerably damaged during the Revolution, but also by the dismantling during its transportation to the museum, François’ tomb was one of the first of Lenoir’s fabriques. He considered this piece an exceptional example of stylistic accomplishment, while also having the added significance of commemorating a king famous for his enlightened patronage of the arts. The monument was originally designed by Philibert de l’Orme, but during its reassembly and restoration, Lenoir added several sculptures by other sixteenth-century masters and performed considerable alterations to the composition. The recumbent statues of the king and his wife, Claude, were by Pierre Bontemps. They were placed on a platform decorated with a relief frieze depicting the battles of Marignan and Cerisoles. The great vault covering the monument was by Germain Pilon, composed of elaborate arabesques and statues of putti extinguishing the flame of life. Of the various reliefs incorporated in the vault, Lenoir singled out the one ‘ingeniously representing the immortality of the soul through an allegory of Christ conqueror of shadows’. Sixteen fluted ionic columns of man-height supported the entablature, over which were placed five figures in marble representing the king and queen in full regal costume, accompanied by their three children. The thirteenth-century hall was set up in the sacristy of the old church, its two doorways opening onto the introductory hall. Unlike the other four museum rooms, which were strung around the main cloister and each accessible only through the cloister corridors, one came upon the thirteenth-century hall directly from the

2.10  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, thirteenth-century hall, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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introductory one. The immediacy of the transition between the two spaces was played to full effect through Lenoir’s decorative scheme. From the large, bright and celebratory first space, one found oneself into a much smaller, dark and distinctly funereal room. The tall and bright timber ceiling of the former church gave way to low and dark stone vaults. The uninterrupted vistas across the introductory hall, encompassing some of the most gloriously ornate marble pieces of the whole museum, were substituted with halfobscured glimpses of roughly hewn stone statues, recumbent on their sombrely aligned

2.11  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, thirteenth-century hall, showing one of the two doorways to the introductory hall, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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tombs. With this meticulously accentuated contrast, Lenoir was aiming to kick-start the chronological circuit, assisting the visitors to abandon themselves to the experience that was opening up before them. The investment in atmosphere, characterising the whole project, was nowhere more pronounced than in the thirteenth-century hall. From the heavy painted vaults of the ceiling – dark blue with golden stars – to the various roughly hewn architectural fragments embedded in the walls and decorating the openings, as well as the imposingly dim light from the small stained glass windows and sepulchral lamps, the main aim here was to convey an overall impression, rather than focus the visitor’s attention. In his attempt to present as vividly as possible the character of ‘a century so remote’, Lenoir wrote that he had searched for and made use of all the details that would compose such a picture ‘in the truest colours’. Though, indeed, he added, this was a task he undertook for every hall of the museum.3 Artistic production in the thirteenth century – which actually encompassed all of early Christianity and the Middle Ages for the museum’s purposes – was described at best as ‘timid’, and at worse as ‘barbarous’. The style was judged to have been in a dormant, undeveloped state, and the artists operating under a heavy veil of ignorance and superstition, merely copying precedent rather than genuinely creating. Consequently, the pieces in this hall were of uniform anonymity, representing the general stylistic shortcomings, yet great emotional power of an era steeped in mysticism and mystery to contemporary eyes. The tombs of the first dynasties from Saint-Denis were displayed in this hall, as well as other funerary pieces and architectural fragments judged sufficiently primitive by Lenoir to fit the context. The recumbent funerary statues of Childebert (†358), Pepin le Bref (†741), Hugues Capet (†996), Philippe le Gros (†1131), Louis IX and his two sons, Louis de France (†1262) and Jean (†1247), Béatrix de Bourbon (†1383) and a variety of other royals of the Carlovingian and Capetian dynasties were all here. Chronological consistency was clearly not the issue, but rather the ideological coherence of a particularly vague yet significant era: the sprawling field of the Middle Ages, where the roots of the nation and all things French lay. Less about an actual century than any other hall, this was the most elusive and conceptual of all spaces, presenting style mostly as atmosphere and feeling rather than anything specific. Invented decorative pieces played an important role, such as the capitals in the ‘Lombard’ style and the hanging lamps designed by Lenoir, as well as the relief portraits of the tragic and extremely popular medieval lovers Héloïse and Abélard. Lenoir commissioned the latter from the sculptor Louis-Pierre Deseine in 1799, and placed them above the two doors of the hall, accentuating its emotional appeal. This collaboration with Deseine is intriguing, in view of the latter’s subsequent turn against the museum and its creator, as we will see in Chapter 4. Original fragments were also highly prized in the display of this hall, such as the eleventh-century piece of mosaic pavement from Saint-Denis, depicting the 12 signs of the zodiac, which was accompanied by an extended explanatory entry in the catalogue. The fourteenth-century hall was separated from the cloister through a light colonnade framing its entrance. This and the fifteenth-century hall featured the most generous openings to the cloister and courtyard, contrasting with the introverted thirteenth-century one. Lenoir explained in the catalogue that during the fourteenth 59

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century, the artists who had travelled to Asia with the crusading Louis IX brought back to France a taste for ‘arabesque’ ornament. As a result, Lenoir continued, elegant and slender ogive arches replaced heavy, depressed vaults and, before long, majestic temples, in imitation of mosques, arose on French soil; and their interiors, charged with gilt and brilliant stained glass, displayed the greatest luxury.4 The decoration of this room was, therefore, appropriately opulent, with columns and arches featuring a forest-like iconography which was considered the origin of the Gothic style. The ceiling was a light

2.12  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, cloister with entrance to fourteenth-century hall on the left, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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blue, with golden fleur-de-lys in a lozenge-grid, and the walls and floor were covered in colourful mosaic. This was one of the most popular rooms, both because of its decorative ebullience and its apparent success in conveying the atmosphere of the century: ‘[this is] the most unified hall […] presenting the most perfect ensemble and transporting the spectator with the greatest ease to the century it is dedicated’.5

2.13  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, fourteenth-century hall, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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The centrepiece of the display was the mausoleum of Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon, another of Lenoir’s fabriques. The king’s statue was taken from Saint-Denis, the queen’s from the Célestins, and the restored wooden coffer on which they lay from the Sainte-Chapelle. The composition was completed by four Corinthian columns from the abbey of Maubuisson supporting a monumental stone tabernacle of uncertain origin.6 Around the walls of the hall, in purpose-built niches, stood an array of statues

2.14  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, fourteenth-century hall, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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of kings and princes, several of which were also represented by recumbent funerary statues from tombs at Saint Denis and elsewhere, running along the base of the walls. In the niches were also statues of the apostles from the Sainte-Chapelle, ‘simplistically executed and with strikingly naïve expressions’, according to Lenoir. At the same time, however, they managed to represent the garments worn at the time with surprising accuracy, giving a good impression of the patterns and textures, reminiscent of ‘Indian shawls, brought over to France by the crusaders’.7

2.15  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, fifteenth-century hall entrance, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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Visitors would have glimpsed the fifteenth-century hall as they entered the fourteenth, to which it was adjacent and equally open to the cloister, through an ornate Corinthian colonnade from Saint-Père at Chartres. Although still not fully accomplished, retaining certain Gothic mannerisms, most of the motifs of the high Renaissance style were identified as already forming in this century. Lenoir wrote that this was owed largely to the genius of Raphael and his work in the Vatican, which was seen by travelling Frenchmen and brought back to France. As Paris possessed very few original buildings of note from this century, Lenoir wrote that he had to develop by himself ‘the portrait of a century almost unknown in the capital’. To assist him with his inventions, he continued, he visited repeatedly the various châteaux of the Cardinal of Amboise and his court, which were good examples of this style.8 Lenoir covered the ceiling and walls of the fifteenth-century hall in arabesque patterns, which, he argued, were considered the most characteristic motifs of the decorative sophistication of the Renaissance, despite their name. The entire decoration of this hall, Lenoir continued, was an elaboration on the style of the tomb of Louis XII with added flourishes of ‘archetypes which I have copied myself from Chartres, Blois, etc.’.9 The light from the windows was filtered through stained glass taken from the church of the Minimes at Passy, allowing a comfortable but not quite brilliant illumination of

2.16  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, fifteenth-century hall, showing (foreground to back) the recumbent statues of Louis XII and his wife, the large tomb of the same couple, and the tomb of Philippe de Commines, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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the room. The centrepiece of this hall was the aforementioned tomb of Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne, which, one read in the catalogue, Lenoir’s initiative alone had saved from the Saint-Denis festival of destruction in 1793. The tomb was badly damaged, so Lenoir ‘felt justified’ in performing a drastic restoration. Two other important pieces in this hall were also Lenoir’s fabrications. For the monument to brothers Philippe and Charles d’Orléans, Lenoir had the statues taken from the larger family mausoleum at the Célestins, and incorporated them in a new construction of Corinthian columns and frieze, featuring an original relief of the death of the Virgin from Saint-Jacquesla-Boucherie. Two completely different versions of the monument to Renée d’Orléans Longueville in Lenoir’s unpublished drawings testify that here also little more than the recumbent statue was original. Alongside the large monument to Louis XII in the centre of the room was another set of recumbent statutes of the king and his wife, remarkably naturalistic for the era, executed by Paul Ponce Trebati. Finally, of note in this hall was the monument to historian Philippe de Commines and his wife, incorporating a celebrated relief of St George killing the dragon. The sixteenth-century hall was conceived by Lenoir as a celebration of French art at the height of its achievement, equally evident in individual pieces and overall decorative style. Supported by the inspired patronage of François I, into whose court Leonardo da Vinci himself was invited, by mid-century a ‘proper renaissance of the arts’ had

2.17  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, sixteenth-century hall, showing (centre) the urn and recumbent statue of François I, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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apparently been achieved. Lenoir wrote that in order to ‘paint this century as brilliantly as would befit it’, he had copied details from monuments and buildings by the key artists of the period from across France, such as Lecot, Bullant and Philibert de l’Orme, and reproduced them in this hall.10 The sources for Lenoir’s decor, however, were not exhausted in the visual arts, but also included descriptions from historians and poets. The emblems of chivalry, for example, as described in contemporary texts, representing religion, country, friendship and love, were incorporated in the highly elaborate

2.18  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, sixteenth-century hall, showing the urn of François I and the tomb of Admiral Chabot, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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ornamentation of the ceiling, as were mystically entwined numbers and other emblems, confirmation of the broader intellectual accomplishment of the era. A Classical portal, designed by Antoine-Marie Peyre, Lenoir’s own architect, marked the monumental entrance to the hall from the cloister. Original stained glass from Vincennes covered the large windows, but still allowed plenty of daylight to enter the room, the brightest in the museum, in accordance with the popular contemporary analogy of illumination to enlightenment. All the artworks in this hall were carefully identified as creations of particular artists since, at this stage of accomplishment, art was thought to be the distinct product of individual genius rather than ‘primitive’, anonymous reproduction of accepted models, as in earlier centuries. Germain Pilon, Jean Goujon, Jean Cousin, Pierre Bontemps and Barthélemy Prieur were the most prominent. Lenoir in his catalogues did not hesitate to compare them to archetypal sculptors of ancient Greece, namely Phidias, Praxiteles, Myron and Lysippos. Several of those French masters had individual memorials erected to them by the curator, usually consisting of funerary stele adorned with reliefs of their portraits and casts of some of their work. Prominent pieces here included the urn containing the heart of François I by Bontemps, from Saint-Denis; the tomb of Admiral Chabot by Cousin, from the Célestins, creatively restored by Lenoir, and recumbent funerary statues of Henri II, Catherine de Medici and François I by Pilon.

2.19  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, seventeenth-century hall, first view, showing the tomb of Charles Le Brun on the near right and the statute of Louis XIV in Roman costume on the near left, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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The seventeenth-century hall was the least decorative and most personality-orientated of the rooms, where almost exclusively commemorative monuments found their place. Lenoir designed a new marble floor for it, and had two doorways opening at either end onto the cloister to serve as entrance and exit. Stained glass from the church of Saint-Gervais and the convent of the Feuillants was installed in the large windows. The seventeenth century was supposed to be more accomplished in the letters than the visual arts, as Lenoir wrote in the catalogue. However, this did not stop him from singling out artists like Michel Anguier, Antoine Coysevox, François Girardon, Hubert Le Sueur and Jacques Sarrazin, who were commemorated both through examples of their work and new marble busts, which Lenoir commissioned for the purpose.11 Several of the most impressive pieces from this century had pride of place in the introductory hall, such as the tomb of Mazarin by Coysevox, the monument to Richelieu by Girardon, and the unusual pyramidal family monument of the Orléans-Longueville by Anguier, suggesting that, despite the theory, Lenoir appreciated that the aesthetic effect of this century’s production was rather advanced. The dramatic pieces in the seventeenth-century hall itself, including the mausoleum to Jacques de Souvré de Courtanvaux by Augier, the monument designed by Charles Le Brun for his mother, Le Brun’s own tomb by Coysevox and many highly naturalistic depictions of individuals in the century’s vivid style, would have also added to the impact of the room, despite any attempts to mitigate it for intellectual reasons.

2.20  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, seventeenth-century hall, second view, showing (clockwise from left) the mausoleum of Souvré de Courtanvaux and the monument to Le Brun’s mother, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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Personalities other than artists celebrated in this hall included Henri IV, France’s most popular king and symbolic of the nation’s triumphs, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, champion of the arts despite his affiliation with the decadent King Louis XIV. The latter had become a singular figure of hate under the Revolution, but was also ubiquitous during the seventeenth century, so Lenoir wrote in his early catalogues that this king was present as an example of the genius of the artists who depicted him, rather than because of his personality. Such was the case with the marble statue of Louis XIV

2.21  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, seventeenth-century hall, detail showing the equestrian statue of Louis XIV, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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in Roman costume by Anguier, and the bronze cast of an equestrian statue, from the original in the Place Vendôme by Girardon. Only later, with the change of political affinities, did the king’s commemoration as a significant ruler of France enter into the museum’s agenda. Lenoir always envisaged an eighteenth-century hall, which was never executed. There were various eighteenth-century monuments in the museum, but the most prominent representation of the contemporary period came in the form of purpose-

2.22  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, cloister, with busts of celebrated men of the eighteenth century, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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made commemorative pieces commissioned by Lenoir, and those donated by families and artists seeking a place in history. Descartes, Boileau, Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, Mabillion, Montfaucon and Turenne were represented, as were many others, once again relaxing chronological accuracy for the sake of an idea. In the absence of an eighteenthcentury hall, these monuments found their place in either the introductory hall, the Elysium or the cloister galleries, to be discussed shortly. In the catalogue, however,

2.23  J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, cloister, showing (foreground to back) the tomb of Valentine de Milan and the entrance to the fifteenth-century hall, Souvenirs du Musée des Monuments Français

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Lenoir included a dedicated eighteenth-century section, where all those pieces were listed, following an introduction to the century’s artistic accomplishment. Despite political circumstances, the winds of regeneration had already begun to blow from earlier in the century, in anticipation, it would seem, of later dramatic changes. Lenoir concluded this catalogue section with a cri de cœur to young artists to ‘march towards immortality’ and ‘repair the errors of the past’, so that the current and future centuries might feature proudly in the history of the country’s arts.12 Beyond the halls, Lenoir paid much attention to the development of the cloister galleries connecting them, in order to make the transition as meaningful as the experience of the rooms themselves. Although he clearly relied on contrasts in the development of each epoch, he simultaneously undermined that distinction in the passage between them. By maintaining the theatricality of the experience between centuries, even if the mood in each was different, he aimed to convey a sense of the continuous flow of time. Significant monuments were also displayed here and, although they sometimes belonged to the transition between dates, such as artists whose work straddled centuries, the emphasis was once again on an integrated aesthetic effect rather than chronological accuracy as an end in itself. In the gallery between the fourteenthand fifteenth-century halls, for example, one found the mausoleum of Gabrielle d’Estrées, one of Lenoir’s fabriques, which belonged to the sixteenth century. In the same gallery was a statue of Adam from the Notre Dame of Paris, attributed to the midthirteenth century. The tombs of Pierre de Navarre and his wife, Catherine d’Alençon, however, were appropriately of the early fifteenth century. Similarly, the two mausolea of Louis de France, son of Charles V, and his wife, Valentine de Milan, were dated to the first decade of the fifteenth century. Both were quite impressive pieces in white marble, while the latter had added significance as the commemoration of a particularly sympathetic historical figure: the tragic wife who died of inconsolable sorrow after her husband’s death.13 Appropriate decoration was also added to the cloister galleries, most notable being the closing of several openings with stained glass. By blocking the view to the outside, the gaze was concentrated on the gallery itself, which was made even more dramatic by the restricted, coloured light coming through the decorated glass. As was the case with several original ornamental fragments incorporated in the museum, some of these windows served both to enhance the ambience and as noteworthy pieces in themselves. The ones in the gallery between the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century halls, for example, enjoyed a considerable status in the collection, being originals from the château of Écouen, based on a cartoon by Raphael. The same gallery was aligned with over a dozen busts of important men of letters, philosophers and a few artists, mostly from the eighteenth. This, doubtless coupled with Lenoir’s inclusion of an eighteenth-century section in his catalogue, encouraged a number of visitors to speak of an eighteenthcentury hall, despite the fact that Lenoir never actually constructed one.14 The role of views was very important throughout the museum, manipulated by Lenoir to communicate various concepts and moods appropriate to the display. The introductory hall, bringing together works from across history in a single, great picture upon entry to the museum, suggested the unity of French art across and beyond history, as an essential, 72

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2.24  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, cloister with entrance to the fourteenth-century hall on the right, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

timeless identity. The cloister galleries, on the other hand, as long perspectives affording glimpses in spaces beyond, were largely about movement and change, offering a sense of process, simultaneously linking and dividing. The larger spaces of the museum complex provided an ideal setting for the elaboration of such views, which Lenoir was clearly aware of. He wrote that, although he was no architect, the art of composing views was familiar to him as a trained painter, and he applied it liberally to his museum ‘in order to add movement to the architecture and produce pleasing perspectives’.15 Furthermore, his drawings for the development of the three courts show a consistent preoccupation with views and the idea of an unfolding spectacle across spaces, framed by colonnades and façades erected for the purpose. Confirming the importance of architecture for his museum, Lenoir planned to have the three courts redesigned, to offer impressions of various centuries. The entrance court would be of the sixteenth century, featuring major pieces from the château of Anet, with busts of artists and other worthies in a series of perimeter niches, and a tall column bearing a winged statue of Fame dedicated to the memory of the illustrious men of France. The second court would be in the style of the fifteenth century, with fragments from the château of Gaillon, and the third court would represent the fourteenth century, with ‘Arabic and Gothic’ arches from an unidentified demolished church in Paris.16 The complete design of the three courts was never executed, but 73

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Lenoir did receive Minister Chaptal’s approval for the transportation of the Anet and Gaillon fragments, which he proceeded to erect in the aforementioned courts. As indicated earlier, the entire portico from Anet, by the legendary Philibert de l’Orme, was placed over the entrance to the introductory hall and main entrance to the museum, in the first court. This is one of the very few parts of the whole edifice to still remain in place today. Lenoir had started developing the Elysium garden at the northwestern end of the site as early as 1796, confirming its significance for the project as a whole. Although declared complete in 1799, it remained a work in progress until the end, like the rest of the museum. The Elysium could be reached through the sequence of three courtyards, more or less in a straight line from the street gate, wherefrom one could catch glimpses of the green space at the far end. However, a visitor was more likely to enter the museum itself first, turning right at the first court into the introductory hall and following the circuit of rooms. The indoor visit concluded, one would then leave from the most direct exit, a passage on the only undeveloped side of the cloister – where the eighteenthcentury and contemporary halls were projected – leading straight into the second court. The garden would then be to one’s right, through the majestic façade from Gaillon and past the third court.

2.25  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, Elysium, view showing (left to right) the fountain of Diana from Anet, the monument to Anne de Montmorency, the funerary urn of Boileau, and the monument to La Fontaine, Boileau, Molière and Racine, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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Lenoir’s initial request for 454 saplings was turned down as extravagant, so he had to make do with 164 pines, cypresses and poplars. More than forty pieces of sculpture were carefully staged among those trees. The majority were commemorative monuments and tombs largely fabricated by Lenoir (columns, sarcophagi, busts and so on), but also decorative pieces scattered around – like the cinerary urns placed on the walls enclosing the garden – in order to give the space an aura of ‘sweet melancholy that would speak to sensitive souls’.17 Perspectival views were as important here, as in the more structured architecture of the halls and cloister. As Lenoir wrote, the greenery of the garden would work both as backdrop and frame for the building and monuments, constructing a multiplicity of ‘favourable’ vistas. In the spirit of a picturesque garden, Lenoir envisaged the monuments in perfect aesthetic balance with the flora, generating the appropriate mood.18 One found here, among others, Lenoir’s fabriques to various illustrious figures such as Descartes, his disciple Rouhault, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of the modern Elysium, all in rather simple Classical designs including sarcophagi, columns and busts. Lenoir also constructed a composite tribute to the four greats of seventeenthcentury French letters – Moliére, Racine, La Fontaine and Boileau – all of whom, with the exception of Racine, had additional individual pieces erected to them. Lenoir

2.26  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, Elysium, view showing (left to right) the fragment from Saint-Laurent, the bust of Rousseau, and the funerary column of Rouhault, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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justified this composition as a tribute to the friendship that had bound these men.19 In the Elysium also stood a monument to Montfaucon, an assemblage of hieroglyphs, Egyptian figures, Greek reliefs, figures surviving from the late Empire period and debris taken from monuments dating from the earliest ages of the monarchy – a composition which Lenoir deemed suitable for his illustrious predecessor, due to his ability to deal with all historical periods equally successfully.20 Other noteworthy pieces in the garden included the lavishly ornate tomb of Dagobert I, legendary king and founder of the abbey of Saint-Denis, commissioned by Louis IX six centuries later and made famous

2.27  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, tomb of Dagobert I, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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in Lenoir’s time through Montfaucon’s writings; the fountain of Diana the huntress from Anet, residence of Diane de Poitiers, with a ‘magnificent group’ in marble by Jean Goujon representing the goddess seated on a stag accompanied by her two dogs; the imposing, unfinished mausoleum to Anne de Montmorency, constable of François I, commissioned by his son to Jean Bullant, and the fragment of an ornate wall from the church of Saint Laurent at Nogent-sur-Seine.21 In this garden, one also found Lenoir’s most popular fabrique, the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard, which was discussed in Chapter 1. Lenoir himself referred to it as having the greatest interest, and devoted to it three whole pages in his catalogue, at no. 515.22

2.28  Jean-Baptiste Réville and Lavallée, tomb of Héloïse and Abélard in the museum garden, Vues pittoresques et perspectives des salles du Musée des Monuments Français

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Combining the historical and stylistic curiosity of the Middle Ages à la Lenoir with the highly popular theme of the famously tragic lovers in the idyllic setting of the garden, this construct perfectly fused the themes of the whole museum. Lenoir wrote that this monument exemplified the style of the twelfth century, with the characteristic clover shape of the arches and the oculi, the reliefs on the tomb’s sides representing the Holy Fathers, and the recumbent statues with joined hands and slightly inclined heads. Nevertheless, as with all of Lenoir’s fabriques, the emphasis was on aesthetic and emotional effect rather than stylistic accuracy. A lengthy inscription with the history of the lovers was placed on the side of the tomb, alongside an epigraph in Greek meaning ‘forever joined’.23 The character of the Elysium was more openly commemorative and contemplative than the rest of the museum, lacking the rigorous chronological sequencing and emphasis on the development of style, which rendered the halls more obviously ‘historical’. Lenoir intended for the Elysium to inspire in the souls of the visitors a ‘holy respect’ for the personalities and the virtues represented there. He referred to the garden in the catalogue as an ‘august place’ and a ‘sacred grove’, and he envisaged that the monuments placed therein would ‘attract the gaze of the philosopher and elevate the soul of the poet and the painter’.24 In this place of poetic immortality, as Dominique Poulot calls it, one could imagine these remains attaining new life in the context of a shared and perpetual bliss, arising from the celebration of the nation’s endurance and greatness.25 The Visitors The Museum of French Monuments remained popular with the public throughout its life. Two articles from Parisian journals in 1797, just as the museum was beginning to take shape, indicated the quality of its appeal. The Semaines critiques ou gestes de l’an V (1797) praised ‘the artistry, the lugubrious magic that Lenoir has invested his museum with’. The article continued in typical Enlightenment spirit: It seems that his [Lenoir’s] hand holds back the centuries from the borders of the abyss, orders them each in its place thus defending them from annihilation, and allows them to reveal their arts, their great men, their tyrants and often their ignorance.26

The thirteenth-century hall received particular attention in this article, perhaps because, at this early stage, it was the most striking one to be completed. In April of the same year, the journal La Clef du cabinet des souverains published a praise for the museum by a certain ‘F.P.’ who, Édouard Pommier says, is no other than François Pommereul, author of the treatise Des institutions propres à encourager et perfectionner les beaux-arts (‘Of institutions appropriate for encouraging and perfecting the fine arts’, 1796).27 The author of the article claimed that, although not all the pieces in the museum were masterpieces, they deserved to become known so that one could understand the artists’ thinking behind their creations, and that, even if Art viewed these monuments indifferently, History would embrace them. The article went on to suggest that such a project should be expanded into ‘a proper museum of French sculpture’, by reuniting 78

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under one roof the most important medieval and Renaissance ‘historic monuments’ now scattered in the provinces.28 The museum’s rational arrangement as a chronological circuit, on one hand, and its appeal to sentiment and imagination, on the other, were the features that most impressed the public – both positively and negatively. It is interesting to note the variation of visitors’ responses concerning these two different aspects, with the museum judged as overly rational and ordered by some, while others found it not enough so. Such was the case, for example, of the Scottish cartographer and antiquarian John Pinkerton, who, in 1802, wrote that he approved of the principle of chronology, being ‘the most natural and instructive method’ for such a display, but found that it was not adhered to rigorously enough in the loosely structured halls. He was especially critical of the ‘capricious’ medley of monuments in the introductory hall, and the misnamed thirteenth-century hall, which, as he correctly observed, included a wide range of medieval monuments from several centuries earlier.29 The Journal des bâtiments civils late in the same year, however, found no such fault, congratulating Lenoir on his ‘fortuitous arrangement’.30 Having visited the museum in its very last days, in 1816, William Stevenson wrote that he could not ‘indeed sufficiently express’ his admiration for Lenoir’s ‘able and learned classification’. But he was equally full of praise for ‘these correct and splendid illustrations of human character and of national genius’. And he concluded: To Mons Le Noir is the stranger indebted for the opportunity of tracing, with a unique facility, the progress of imitative skills, from the earliest ages of the French Monarchy down to the present times. These form at once a regular and complex climax of perfection in Art, and a most interesting series of historical elucidation.31

On the other hand, the dramatist and critic Louis-Sebastien Mercier, writing in late 1797, found that the chronological arrangement severely detracted from the unique charm of the collection as a jumbled depot. He wrote that he had enjoyed enormously the earlier phase, where the ‘magnificent confusion’ allowed the meditative imagination to contemplate ‘death and time as the veritable sovereigns of the universe’. At that stage, he argued, the Petits-Augustins offered a unique and most curious spectacle, most imposing and novel, appealing at once to the eye and to the imagination. Saints, mythological heroes, virgins and kings, vases, columns and urns, all thrown together without order, as if by chance, composed a striking image of the agglomeration of centuries. And he continued: It was the true mirror of our revolution – what contrasts and juxtapositions, what capricious twists and turns of fate, what singular chaos! […] No, never had chance thrown together a grander tragicomic spectacle than this unexpected heap, which would fire up the most rigid imagination!32

Arranged in a chronological order, however, the pieces had become mute and the museum no longer excited the imagination or invited fruitful meditation. It is worth quoting more of Mercier’s text at some length, for his inspired condemnation of rational classification as an enemy to both sentiment and creative intellect:

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 Oh grief ! That precious confusion exists no more, the great spectacle has been erased, all those piquant contrasts have disappeared, classicomania, which has no eyes, has destroyed them all – and why? To draw a monotonous and insipid regularity, aiming to erect chapels to the honour of artists, separate the centuries, mark the progress of sculpture, demolishing the temple of meditation and reflection […]. Cold symmetry has chased away that sublime disorder: we are no longer moved or amazed, there is no more surprise […]. Alas! This is today the cabinet of an amateur, not the universe of a thinker!33

Of the exactly opposite opinion, however, was Bonet, one of those who, as we saw in Chapter 1, considered a museum of monuments too important a project to be left to Lenoir and the Petits-Augustins, and proposed to have it moved to Notre Dame. For him, the existing display was a ‘mélange’ which did not match the ‘simple, noble and majestic’ organisation that should govern such a museum.34 Most visitors, however, were unconcerned by either extreme of this argument and appeared to generally appreciate the chronological arrangement of the display, albeit not too strictly, allowing for considerable flourishes to engage other faculties than just reason. Napoleon and Josephine themselves had been impressed by the museum – a fact which Lenoir never failed to advertise. Napoleon first visited with Josephine in December 1800, and was so taken with it that he reputedly exclaimed: ‘Lenoir, you transport me to Syria!’35 Francis Haskell suggests that, with this comment, Bonaparte was referring to the popular theory, which Lenoir adhered to, that the Gothic style had Arabic origins.36 Such was the attention to decorative detail lavished by Lenoir on the construction of the halls and the evocative arrangement of the monuments that the very origins of the styles represented seemed to come alive, concluded the First Consul. Considering the significance of origins for Lenoir and his project – discussed in detail in Chapter 3 – it is no wonder that the curator embraced this alleged comment as the highest praise. Josephine visited again on 8 April 1807, for a specially prepared night visit.37 Lenoir described how the halls were all lit according to the scheme of progressive enlightenment, which he had also followed in the construction of the windows and the availability of natural light. As well as candles and lamps inside the halls, Lenoir had apparently placed torches behind the stained glass, so that coloured light of controlled intensity would stream into the spaces, setting the appropriate mood and producing a heightened effect. Lenoir reported how complimentary the empress was to his museum and the particular way he had arranged and decorated the halls. He also did not fail to flatter her, by commenting on her remarkable knowledge of the arts.38 Josephine had become one of Lenoir’s most avid supporters, employing him for the ornamentation of the park at her château of Malmaison, which he proceeded to redesign ‘in the English style’. He made extensive plans for numerous constructions, some of which were actually built, such as the Temple of Love, a sepulchral fabrique as all English gardens required a tomb, and various copies of Roman sculptures skilfully synthesised and placed around the grounds. Lenoir also regularly provided original pieces to the empress, which he picked out while collecting for his museum.39 There were other eponymous visitors to the Petits-Augustins who were captivated by the spectacle set up by Lenoir. Two of them deserve special mention because of their own prominent contribution to the history of museums: Sir John Soane and Wilhelm 80

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von Humboldt. The English architect expressed his admiration for the Museum of Monuments as one of the first ‘modern’ monuments of France, and for the Elysium, which he identified as an important predecessor of the Père Lachaise cemetery.40 Despite their different circumstances and ostensible agendas, Soane’s and Lenoir’s projects shared many similarities, revolving around the idea of meaning in history beyond historicist narratives and the role of fragments in this process. Humboldt, the prominent Prussian intellectual, instrumental in the foundation and development of the Royal (now Altes) Museum in Berlin, visited in 1799 and praised Lenoir’s project highly, especially in relation to its communication of history. As Elke Harten points out, it is impossible not to speculate that this encounter played a part in the formation of the great Berlin project twenty years later.41 Humboldt was impressed by the coherence of the project and the ‘one, continuous view’ in which the progress of the arts could be perceived across several centuries. This is an excellent way, he wrote, to communicate the continuity of history and to see how things ‘join together’ – something which the ‘dead letter of history’ can only deliver incompletely, in bits and pieces. The emphasis on coherence and the primacy of visual over textual communication can be seen clearly in the Altes, where architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel masterfully produced a flowing narrative of the development of the arts from the beginning of mankind to the present, articulated architecturally through the entry sequence to the galleries, and pictorially through a composition of frescos adorning these spaces.42 The unified spectacle offered by the Museum of Monuments, which constituted a departure from the autonomous, connoisseurial approach to each piece expected at the time, was what visitors were most attracted to. Almost invariably, their accounts emphasised the narrative aspect of the project, locating the significance of the collection in its capacity to be addressed as a varied albeit coherent whole. For example, the Dutchwoman Henrica Rees Van Tets came to the now closed museum in 1819 and, recalling a previous visit with admiration, wrote how ‘everything corresponded – the architecture, the stained glass, the monuments’.43 Visitors apparently experienced the chronological narrative as more than a didactic construct addressed to their intellect alone. A sense of dramatic involvement, stimulating the imagination and engaging the emotions, infused the accounts of the museum, even on those occasions when the more sober aspects of the arrangement were discussed. The statesman Karl von Berckheim, visiting Paris from the duchy of Baden, devoted a single page of his travel memoirs to the Museum of Monuments, with the specific intention of describing the novelty of the chronological arrangement. Nevertheless, he wrote that one could not enter the thirteenth-century hall without a sense of ‘holy respect’, while the elegance and magnificence displayed in the fifteenth and sixteenth-century halls filled one with increasing pleasure.44 Even the Scotsman John Pinkerton, who, as mentioned earlier, criticised the museum for lack of rigour, felt compelled to compliment it as an overall experience, admitting that it was ‘one of the most interesting [museums] in Paris’, and one which ‘may be very often revisited with fresh amusement and instruction’.45 The museum’s sentimental appeal was strongly linked to its commemorative agenda and the vivid presentation of various personalities across a number of monuments and catalogue texts. It is significant that the pieces most mentioned in visitors’ accounts were 81

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those that Lenoir himself distinguished in his catalogues, enlivening them through biographical detail and anecdote. Captain William Dorset Fellowes, a well-travelled Englishman and author of several memoirs, wrote an account of his visit to Paris ‘in the interesting month of July 1815’, in the form of 25 letters ‘to a friend’. Taking place shortly after Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo and the second restoration of the monarchy, the aim of Fellowes’s trip was to observe the changes wrought by recent events on the city, which he had visited several times before. He had, however, never been to the Museum of Monuments, and was so impressed when he finally visited that he dedicated a whole letter to it, when neither Louvre nor Pantheon were given such an honour. This otherwise very pragmatic and seasoned author praised the zeal of Lenoir for salvaging these ‘innumerable beautiful monuments’ and proceeded to quote sections from the museum’s catalogue and several poems relating to the dramatic lives of personalities represented therein, such as Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII, Jeanne d’Arc and Mary Queen of Scots, whose supposed emotional outburst on her departure from France for England was inscribed in a plaque at the introductory hall. Fellowes was especially taken by the garden, which, he wrote, included ‘several very curious and beautiful busts, altars and tombs, [and] the walks of which are so arranged as to make it a place of mournful and solitary meditation’. As with the majority of visitors, the piece that affected Fellowes most was the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard. He wrote: ‘I shall never forget the sort of sensation I experienced when I first beheld the truly interesting monument of Abelard and Eloisa, brought here from the abbey of the Paraclete.’46 Fellowes closed his series of letters by admitting that the effect of the monument he saw at the Petits-Augustins was such that he dedicated his penultimate day in France to visiting Argenteuil, in the outskirts of Paris, and the abbey ‘which was once celebrated for its abbess, the beautiful and accomplished Eloisa’. And, once more, the author proceeded to cite some relevant lines, this time from Alexander Pope’s popular poem ‘Eloisa to Abelard’.47 The interest of the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard for English-speaking visitors was no doubt further enhanced by this poem, published early in the eighteenth century. The travel writer John Carr wrote about his visit to the museum with considerable admiration throughout, but reserved the highest praise – complete with citation from said poem – for Lenoir’s construct to the two lovers. ‘Upon approaching this treasurable antique,’ wrote Carr, ‘all those feelings rushed upon me, which the beautiful, and affecting narrative of those disastrous lovers, by Pope, has often excited in me. The melancholy Heloise seems to breathe from her tomb here […]’.48 Anne Plumptre, another English writer, who lived in France for three years and visited both the Louvre and the PetitsAugustins regularly, wrote in her memoir of 1810: The fabled gods and heroes in the Louvre, while we regard them with the highest admiration as models of perfection in the art of sculpture, yet cannot produce the same effect upon the feelings as is experienced in contemplating these monuments of departed worth and greatness. We admire the beautiful proportions, the exquisite symmetry of the Apollo and the Diana, yet no emotion of sympathy for the original is excited in the bosom; but who can contemplate the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard without a sigh!49

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The fascination with personalities in the Museum of Monuments took an intriguing ‘scientific’ turn, with visitors attempting to match what was known – or assumed – of the historical figures’ characters with the facial features and expression of their effigies. This was obviously inspired by Johann Kaspar Lavater’s recent theory of physiognomy, published in German in his native Switzerland in the 1770s, but widely translated and popular in France and elsewhere.50 The German theologian and writer Augustus Hermann Niemeyer, travelling in France in 1807, upon observing the statue of Charles d’Anjou at the Petits-Augustins, was impressed by how cagey he looked, and exclaimed that ‘not even a physiognome would have been able to detect in its expression the pitiless man who decapitated in the market of Naples the sixteen-year old Conradin’; and he then proceeded to cite parts of the Sicilian Vespers.51 Such was the appeal of the museum that admirers wrote elegies to it even after its closure. Poulot speaks appropriately of the great posthumous success of the PetitsAugustins in the 1830s and 1840s, citing a number of artists, historians, archaeologists and curators who reminisced about Lenoir’s museum with great fondness.52 Visual artists continued to be inspired by and draw from the Museum of Monuments, often setting their scenes in various spaces of Lenoir’s project. One such was Charles-Marie Bouton, whose Folie de Charles VI of 1817 shows an episode of the eponymous king’s life, son of Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon, taking place in the realistically rendered fourteenth-century hall of the museum. The French historian Jules Michelet wrote in

2.29  Charles-Marie Bouton, Folie de Charles VI, 1817, Musée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse © Hugo Maertens Bruges/Direction des musées de France

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1846, describing his childhood visits to the museum, that it was these experiences that gave him his first sense of history.53 The fusion of all the elements that gave the Museum of Monuments its unique character, as perceived by Michelet, was further elaborated in his History of the French Revolution: I still remember the vivid emotion which would always stir my heart when, as a little boy, I would pass under those sombre vaults to contemplate those pale faces, curiously, ardently searching from hall to hall, century to century. What was I seeking? The life of days gone by, no doubt, and the spirit of the ages. I was not sure whether perhaps they still lived, all those sleepers of marble, lying on their tombs. I could not tell if Chilipéric and Frédégonde were not about to sit up, or if Diane d’Anet, charming and nude, was not just sheltering from the heat and resting after her hunt. Wasn’t she just about to stand? At the powerful call of the Revolution, a host of historic figures long dead have returned to gather in this valley of Josaphat. For the first time, order reigned among them, the only real order there is, that of the ages. France could finally see its own development from century to century, from person to person. From tomb to tomb, she could examine her conscience.54

Another nineteenth-century French historian, Augustin Thierry, also identified the Museum of Monuments as an early influence on his love of history, and regretted its closure.55 Alexandre du Sommerard, the founder of the Museum of Cluny, one of the ‘legacy’ projects of the Petits-Augustins, also expressed his deep regret about the closure of its predecessor, praising Lenoir for arranging ‘so picturesquely’ the collection, but above all, for ‘drawing attention to the effect and importance of these old things’.56 Historian and statesman François Guizot, famous for the initiation of the General Inspectorate of Historic Monuments in 1830, and thus of the modern French policy of cultural heritage, named Lenoir as the single most important contributor to this development. In his report to the king of the same year, introducing his idea of a systematic recording and conservation policy for the arts, he referred to the project at the Petits-Augustins as a pioneering moment in the formation of a heritage consciousness.57 Several decades later, in 1867, Education Minister Ernest Vinet emphasised again the nation’s debt to Lenoir: Lenoir did not only create, in tempestuous times, a museum full of poetry and a refuge for the old art of France; he also gave us Augustin Thierry: it is through visiting the Gothic galls of this picturesque museum, so regrettably now closed, that the eloquent, penetrating and patient interpreter of our ancient chronicles conceived the idea of detangling the chaos of our history’s origins.58

Similarly, in 1872, the curator of the museum of Pau recollected his own visits to the Petits-Augustins with fondness, confirming once again the significance of the project for the development of the nation’s historical consciousness and its host of pioneering historians, who thus were able to ‘bring light into the those parts of our national history that had remained obscure’.59 Despite the detailed account of ways in which a visitor might proceed throughout the museum, which Lenoir offered as preface to his catalogue editions since 1800, it would be a misunderstanding of the curator’s intentions if this was read as a prescription for the ‘perfect visit’.60 This was an opportunity for Lenoir to enrich the narrative of his monuments and their personalities through an individualised account, by recording 84

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personal feelings in ways which even the effusive style of the times would not permit in the main text for each entry. The visitors were invited to design their own experience, or, to borrow Dominique Poulot’s expression, to ‘construct an art of visiting’, whether knowledgeable or ignorant, rational or emotional, selective or completist.61 This was an expression of the changing attitudes of the time, shifting towards a democratisation of previously exclusive and controlled experiences – such as ‘appreciating’ art in the academic Salons. With the new sensibility emerging in the wake of the Revolution yet clearly transcending it, a new ‘modern’ public was constructed, with an unprecedented degree of autonomy and control over their experiences, including those ostensibly ‘for instruction’. Lenoir’s museum clearly invested in this emancipation, employing a wide range of devices for captivating its audiences beyond established norms. The result was of considerable appeal to the wider public across the world, but drew acute criticism from a small yet intransigent front of ‘traditionalists’, for whom these devices, and in fact the very nature of the collection at the Petits-Augustins, were an affront to both art and the nation. Notes 1 Description, year VIII, p. 9. 2 AN F13 871 (17 vendémiaire year VI). 3 Description, year X, p. 124. 4 Ibid., year VIII, pp. 161ff. 5 J.E. Biet and Jean-Pierre Brès, Souvenirs du Musée des Monumens Français (Paris, 1821–26), p. xvii. 6 Discussed in Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, 1994), p. 183. 7 Description, year X, p. 146. 8 Ibid., year VIII, pp. 177ff. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., year X, pp. 181–2. 11 See Jules Joseph Guiffrey, ‘Bustes commandés à Michallon et Deseine’, Nouvelles archives de l’art français, 2/2 (1880–81), pp. 378–83. 12 Description, year VIII, pp. 315–67. 13 See Lenoir’s comments in ibid., p. 181. 14 The two remaining rooms around the cloisters, shown blank in the plan by Biet of 1815, were shown appropriately developed with the necessary openings in Lenoir’s plan for further development of the museum of 1801–1802, which included the three projected courts. 15 Lenoir, Museé impérial des monuments français (Paris, 1810), p. 215. 16 See Lenoir, Compte rendu sur l’état actuel du Musée des monuments français (Paris, year VIII), pp. 4–6.

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 17 Description, year X, p. 16 18 Ibid., p. 330. 19 Ibid., p. 331. 20 Musée (1806), 5, p. 200. 21 Description, year X, pp. 100, 203, 235. 22 Ibid., year XI, pp. 102–4. 23 It is worth noting that in the Album Lenoir, vol. I, at the Louvre Cabinet des Estampes, six drawings are dedicated to this monument (nos 88–93), depicting four variations of the design: the executed one, with the rosettes, the busts by Desein and inscription (no. 89); a second version, without the busts, inscription or rosettes, but with the gryphons in the four corners much accentuated and a continuous decorative band around the canopy (no. 88); a re-working of the second version with stained glass fitted in the arches of all but one side of the monument (no. 91), and a fourth, still larger version closed off with stained glass, but also showing four and three arches on each side of the canopy respectively, rather than three and two as in all the previous versions (no. 92). 24 Description, year X, p. 337. 25 Dominique Poulot, ‘L’Élysée du Musée des monuments français: un jardin de la mémoire sous le Premier Empire’, Dalhousie French Studies, 29 (1994), p. 164. 26 Reproduced by Lenoir in Description, year VI, pp. 7–10. 27 Édouard Pommier, L’art de la liberté: Doctrines et débats de la Revolution française (Paris, 1991), p. 377. 28 La Clef du cabinet des souverains, 84 (24 germinal year V), pp. 836–8. 29 John Pinkerton, Recollections of Paris in the Years 1802–3–4–5, 2 vols (London, 1806), vol. I, pp. 201–2. 30 Journal des bâtiments civils, 12 nivôse year XI. 31 William Stevenson, Journal of a tour through part of France, Flanders and Holland […] made in the summer of 1816 (Norwich, 1817), p. 146. 32 Sebastien Mercier, ‘Sur le dépôt des Petits-Augustins, dit le Musée des Monumens français’, Journal d’économie publique, de morale, de politique, V (Paris, year V), p. 327. 33 Ibid., p. 328. 34 Joseph Bonet, ‘Projet de transférer dans le ci-devant Eglise de Notre-Dame de Paris le Muséum des monumens français placés dans l’Eglise des Petits-Augustins’, AN F13 507. 35 Description, year XI, p. 113. 36 Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT, 1993), p. 243. 37 Reported in the Journal de l’Empire (27 April 1807). 38 Musée (1809), p. xv. 39 Adolphe-Mathurin de Lescure, Le château de la Malmaison: histoire, description, catalogue des objets exposés sous les auspices de S.M. l’Impératrice (Paris, 1867). 40 Susan Feinberg-Millenson, Sir John Soane’s Museum (Anne Arbor, MI, 1987), pp. 140–41.

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a visit 41 Elke Harten, ‘Museen und Museumsprojekte des Französischen Revolution: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte einer Institution’, unpublished PhD thesis (Berlin, 1989), p. 179. 42 See Barry Bergdoll and Hélène Lipstadt, ‘Architecture as Alchemy’, Progressive Architecture, 62/10 (1981), pp. 72–7. 43 Henrica Rees Van Tets, Voyage d’une Hollandaise en France en 1819 (Paris, 1966), p. 27. 44 Karl von Berckheim, Lettres sur Paris, 1806–1807 (Heidelberg, 1807), p. 261. 45 Pinkerton, Recollections, vol. I, p. 207. 46 William Dorset Fellowes, Paris During the Interesting Month of July 1815. A Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend in London (London, 1815), pp. 131–8. 47 Ibid., pp. 163–4. 48 John Carr, The Stranger in France: A Tour from Devonshire to Paris (London, 1803), p. 224. 49 Anne Plumptre, A Narrative of Three Years Residence in France, 3 vols (London, 1810), vol. 1, p.30. 50 Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–78), trans. into French as L’Art de connaître les hommes par la physionomie. 51 Augustus Hermann Niemeyer, Beobachtungen auf einer Deportationsreise nach Frankreich im Jahr 1807 (Halle, 1824), pp. 368–9. 52 Dominique Poulot, ‘Alexandre Lenoir et les Musées des Monuments français’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, II: La nation (Paris, 1986), pp. 520–21. 53 Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (Paris, 1866), pp. xx–xxi. 54 Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 9 vols (Paris, 1847–53), vol. VIII, pp. 41–2. 55 Augustin Thierry, Récits des temps Mérovingiens précédés de Considérations sur l’Histoire de France, 2 vols (Brussels, 1840), vol. I, p. 240. 56 Quoted in Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT, 1993), p. 249. 57 See Dominique Poulot, ‘The Birth of Heritage: Le Moment Guizot’, Oxford Art Journal, XI (1989). 58 Journal des débats, 23 April 1867. 59 Quoted in Poulot, ‘Alexandre Lenoir’, p. 521. 60 This started with the Description of year VIII. Although the Preface is signed ‘Joseph Lavallée’, one of the engravers who recorded the museum, it has been convincingly argued that the style and purpose of the text betrays Lenoir himself; see Dominique Poulot, ‘Surveiller et s’instruire’: La Révolution française et l’intelligence de l’héritage historique, vol. 344 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 388–9. 61 Dominique Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine, 1789–1815 (Paris, 1997), p. 348.

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3 In Search of Order

The Invention of History The Museum of Monuments was first and foremost about history. Ostensibly, in Lenoir’s own words, its aim was to demonstrate the link between the progress of the arts and the passage of time. It is apparent, however, that a richer and more complex sense of history was also at work, which encompassed and united all the seemingly non-historical aspects of the museum, including the precedence of atmosphere over chronological rigour, the investment in sentiment, and the relevance of a hybrid space like the Elysium. As we saw in the Introduction, the dissolution of established hierarchies and meanings that followed the Revolution forced art and the realm of symbolic representation as a whole into a radical reconsideration. Almost overnight, major categories of material culture with religious and royalist associations were proscribed as inimical to the new order of things. Though partly attempted during earlier phases of Revolutionary regimes, a literal tabula rasa was neither possible nor, ultimately, desirable, as material culture was essential for securing the new nation’s identity. A process of appropriation was therefore required, which would discredit the proscribed associations of artefacts, while replacing them with others contributing to the new ideology. The idea of a historical account of material culture outside the canon of high art existed for several decades, in the seminal writings of Bernard de Montfaucon, most significantly his Les Monumens de la Monarchie françoise (‘Monuments of the French Monarchy’, 1729–33), and of Count de Caylus with his Recueil d’antiquités (‘Collection of antiquities’, 1752–67), where French monuments were included for the first time in the context of a discussion previously reserved for Greek and Roman art. Coinciding with the early days of the Revolution, Aubin-Louis Millin’s opus on national antiquities (Antiquités nationales, ou Recueil de monumens pour servir à l’histoire générale et particulière de l’empire français [‘National antiquities, or collection of monuments in the service of the general and particular history of the French empire’], 1790) marked a considerable change by combining exclusively French monuments with a modern historiographic agenda, rather than, like Montfaucon, being reliant on traditional structures of royal lineage. These texts constituted important precedents for the development of the 89

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Revolutionary debate on the ‘historic monument’ – that is, the relevance of art and architecture in the writing of national history and the need for their conservation beyond aesthetic value. However, in the context of the Revolution, the idea of the historic monument acquired an urgent new significance as the foundation of the nation’s renewed cultural identity.1 The fragments of the discredited old order became the building blocks of the new, through a fundamental act of transformation from symbols of a specific ideology to signs of a universal process. Although the Revolutionary depots were provisional, the transformation of their contents was permanent, as it heralded the modern understanding of artefact-based history. In this light, the creation of the Museum of Monuments was the logical conclusion of the generative idea behind the depots. As Reinhart Koselleck reminds us, traditionally there was the writing of a continuous ‘current history’ (Zeitgeschichte), which accounted for something more akin to a ‘former present’ than a ‘past’.2 Whereas the legitimacy of the Ancien Régime was drawn from the continuity of this ‘present’, the Revolutionary legitimacy became ‘a coefficient of movement, mobilising history in terms of the prevailing prospect of the future’. In that sense, the Revolution provided ‘a lasting title of legitimacy in the form of a metahistorical constant’. Koselleck recognises a new paradigm at work, one that required the transcendence of history as Geschichte – the traditional understanding of history as recurrent temporality and lived experience – in favour of Historie, which is history as the object of scientific historiography:3 [History] is no longer a given temporal order – for instance, a God-given order – of all of history that arranges the material of history, but instead the history of the future and the history of the past are determined by desires and plans, as well as the questions which arise in the present. The experiential space of contemporaries is the epistemological kernel of all histories.4

The historian had unprecedented freedom in the writing of this new history, being in a position to construct hypothetical histories, which drew more attention to the prerequisites of all histories than to the particularity of these histories. This was the philosophical history of the Enlightenment, more interesting in its abstraction than its specificity, in its order rather than its content. The predominance of principle, or ‘prerequisite’, in this new sense of history had another crucial implication, which Leo Strauss has identified as the conviction of the present that it understands the past better than it understood itself.5 Hans-Georg Gadamer elaborates on this by saying that such a conviction ‘excludes from the outset the possibility that the thoughts which are handed down to us could simply be true’. He calls this ‘the obstinate positivity of a naive historicism’, which operates by applying the (falsely) superior perspective of the present to the whole of the past.6 Despite its theoretical authority, the present is actually absent from this sense of history, where the operation of understanding the past is geared to and substantiated by an eagerly anticipated yet perpetually elusive future. The primary role of posterity in Enlightenment philosophy and the construction of the new sense of history were fundamental to the museum and the role of the monument in the project of historical invention. In this paradigm, since the only way the past could exist was through its recognition by posterity, an element of preservation became necessary to the 90

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project of invention, and the idea of the historic monument, aligned with that of the museum, became two of its principal media. In that light, the monuments Lenoir was left to work with were not an arbitrary mass to begin with. They were pieces that carried a key significance – albeit not yet fully articulated – for the project of historical invention. What the Museum of Monuments contributed to the communicative potential of the pieces in this new, historicist order of things was precisely the articulation they were lacking, by structuring them into a coherent, emancipated body that could be read as a single narrative. Chronology, which Lenoir used for the arrangement of his collection, was the most precise manifestation of this new idea of history. Although there had been precedents of art collections arranged in this manner, this was still an innovative and rather experimental way of displaying work, breaking from traditional hierarchies. However, the most direct influence on Lenoir regarding chronology was to be found not in previous collections, but in a book, Winckelmann’s seminal Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (‘History of Ancient Art’), published in German in 1764 and translated into French two years later as Histoire de l’art chez les Anciens. This was the first properly chronological account of art and, although it dealt with the Classical world of Antiquity, Lenoir did not hesitate to cite it as a principal guide for the development of his museum. It is interesting to note that, just before his depot was made official, the curator had proposed that both the ‘masterpieces’ in the Louvre and his ‘historic monuments’ in the Petits-Augustins should be chronologically arranged, as chronology was ‘the demarcating line that nature itself has traced’, and that through it the museum would become ‘a book open to instruction’.7 But for all its debt to precedent, Lenoir’s chronological display of the ‘outcast’ Ancien Régime monuments resulted in an unprecedented composition. In the Museum of Monuments, the chronological sequence was not an optional, alternative mode of presentation – as with earlier cases of such arrangement – but a fundamental basis for the very meaning of his project. By conferring the ‘natural’ order of the progress of time on these monuments, the museum not only absolved them of all their previously dubious associations, but gave them a new, more enduring identity, that of the ‘historic’, which still serves them to this day. Even after the passing of the Revolution, when the pieces in the Petits-Augustins could safely be returned to their places of origin – as several critics demanded – Lenoir argued convincingly for the museum as the place were the monuments could be experienced as a meaningful collection in ways that would have been impossible outside its walls.8 The implication here was that the historicist construct to which the monuments contributed had a greater claim to truth than the socio-political and even metaphysical implications of their original situation. In their newly discovered capacity to testify on history, the monuments were laying claim to an objective and permanent order, which transcended what was seen as the arbitrariness and transience of their original references.

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National Heritage The ultimate goal of historical invention was to provide the newly defined nation with the legitimacy of age and with an unquestionable collective identity, freed from traditional affiliations (God, king and so on). From the later eighteenth century onwards, the development of modern political ideology began to erode tradition as the vehicle of collective identity and memory, alongside the transformation of history from implicit ground to explicit, positive science. The idea of the state as the secular source of all authority was accompanied by an understanding of the past as a concrete, objective source of credibility. The Revolution created the radical conditions where such notions were suddenly and urgently relevant. In this scheme of things, art and architecture had a crucial role to play as ‘historic monuments’, collectively composing the new realm of ‘national heritage’.9 This concept was the crucial mediator between the past and the future, having substituted the role of tradition in the establishment of continuity. It was as heritage that the scattered, ambiguous materials of the past were united, in order to form the building blocks for the future. The museum, as it emerged from Revolutionary debates, was the locus par excellence for the presentation of heritage. It was there that rationally arranged and publicly accessible groups of artefacts would compose patrimonial narratives from the past, which could safely extend to include the totality of the nation’s cultural output across its reaches, but also across time. Through the idea of patrimony and its exemplary manifestation in the museum, history was fixed as the similarly arranged and publicly accessible ground, which secured the nation’s identity and projected it indefinitely into the future. The Museum of Monuments represented a particularly significant case of the quest for heritage. Quite literally overnight, the objects that found their way into the PetitsAugustins were transformed from living participants in the continuity of tradition and its rituals into building blocks for the construction of the new history and identity of the nation. The vast majority of the artefacts that remained in the Museum of Monuments had no claim to independent aesthetic value, unlike the unambiguous masterpieces in the Louvre. Works referred to as ‘masterpieces’ in the Petits-Augustins were thought so in comparative terms, measuring their artistic achievement in relation to the accomplishment of their era. In other words, these works did not already belong to the emancipated aesthetic category of ‘high art’ – it was precisely this deficit which kept them from being claimed by the Louvre. As high art, the Louvre pieces were already once removed from the fabric of the social continuum, their participation in that rarefied aesthetic category preceding and modifying all other meaning. The pieces in the Museum of Monuments, however, were only perceived to be meaningful as parts of a greater whole, the physical whole of the church/palace/urban structure to which they belonged and, most importantly, the symbolic whole of the traditional paradigm in which they actively participated. So no amount of rearranging or concealing would suffice in changing their character, unless a holistic transformation of their very nature as ‘monuments’ would take place. In that sense, the transformation of Lenoir’s monuments to heritage was a more radical operation than the equivalent in the Louvre. The works in the Louvre defined 92

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the nation to the extent that the latter adhered to the Enlightenment criterion of upholding the universal category of aesthetic merit as a necessary aspect of its makeup. When the victorious Republican army under Napoleon gathered the artistic riches of Europe and brought them to the Louvre in 1798, the idea was that these examples of the highest artistic achievement really belonged to France as the only truly enlightened nation. Liberated from the shackles of despotism and on the path to regeneration, France was the only place fulfilling the potential of these works, which, as products of exceptional genius transcended their necessarily constricted context and anticipated the age of Enlightenment. In that sense, they were France’s ‘national’ heritage, because only France could lay claim to their true nature, as manifestations of the endurance of human genius across history. This identification was not manifested in actual history, but in the history of an ideal, and as such, the geographic origins of the works were irrelevant. The universality of the Enlightenment ideal and the fundamental abstraction of aesthetic categories eased the transformation of all high art into any one nation’s heritage. The Museum of French Monuments, on the other hand, participated in this process quite differently. The idea of progress towards the age of Enlightenment and the nation’s imminent fulfilment of this ideal was fundamental to the structuring of the museum’s chronology and in Lenoir’s rhetoric on the brilliant future facing the nations’ artists. However, this aspect of the museum was merely tangential to the invention of heritage. The evidence of enlightened achievement in the artefacts at the PetitsAugustins was negligible compared to that of the masterpieces in the Louvre. But what actually mattered in Lenoir’s project vis-à-vis heritage was their very existence, irrespective of aesthetic merit. By being unambiguously French and stylistically distinct, they directly alluded to the historical extension of the nation, tracing its development as a meaningful narrative. As fragments of a recognisable whole, regardless of any discredited associations this might have carried, the artefacts were concrete evidence of the continuity and coherence of the nation as a living culture, developing and changing, yet always maintaining its essential identity. They were now pure ‘monuments’ – that is, evidence and reminder of the irresistible progress of history and development of the nation, without the mediation of such transient concepts as monarchy or religion, as was the case in Montfaucon and other earlier historians’ work. The Quest for Origins With the radical changes signalling the demise of the divine paradigm across the eighteenth century, and the ensuing need for a secular history, the origins of human civilisation acquired a new significance. Linked to the requirement of full accountability, as opposed to inherited wisdom, the search for primary causes came to dominate culture. As the most obvious and imposing remnants of the distant past were buildings, the discourse of origins pertaining to architecture flourished in particular. In France, figures like Laugier, Caylus and both François and Jacques-François Blondel were instrumental in this, with seminal works such as the Essai sur l’architecture (‘Essay on architecture’, 1755), where Laugier almost single-handedly established the notion of the primitive hut, 93

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and the six volumes of the Cours d’architecture (‘Course of architecture’, 1771–77) by the younger Blondel, who rationalised the development of ancient architecture in line with the emerging notion of the progress of history. Egypt, with its unique and fascinating monuments recorded even in the oldest surviving texts of Antiquity, held a place of unparalleled significance in the project to establish the historical origins of mankind.10 The belief that the earliest Egyptian civilisation held a mystical key to the beginning of human endeavour was already popular in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, and especially with Napoleon’s campaign, the interest in Egypt reached its peak as the subject of countless studies ranging from occult mysticism to analytical reasoning and the nascent science of archaeology. Bernard de Montfaucon, prior to his work on the monuments of the French monarchy, had published the 15 volumes of his L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (‘Antiquity explained and represented in figures’, 1719–24), where he consolidated the thesis that Egypt was the mother of all Western civilisation, with Classical Greece owing to it substantially, despite the latter perfecting its arts to an unprecedented and as yet unsurpassed height. The exclusivity of Egypt’s claim to origins was challenged by Winckelmann’s Geschichte, mentioned earlier in this chapter, where the German scholar argued for the autonomy of Greek art. Influential as this was, the importance of Egypt as originary moment continued to dominate the quest for origins. Analytical studies comparing different cultures across the world flourished in relation to this quest, as a ‘scientific’ method for identifying first causes through the tracing of similarities. As Sylvia Lavin writes, the culling of data from the ancient world was part of the attempt to reconstruct the beginning of man. She argues that these studies were less intended to shed light on the past than to inform the contemporary world, as the notion of origins was more of an intellectual category than a chronological datum. She also points out that, ‘as primitive peoples came to mean those who lived in a state of nature rather than those who were temporally remote, the grip of chronology on the conception of history was loosened’.11 The main aim was to decipher the essential truths behind the multifarious manifestations of civilisation, so all efforts were bent on uncovering underlying consistencies and, ultimately, unity in as wide a terrain of human endeavour as possible. This search for hidden essential truths was never far from mysticism and the occult, the alter ego of the Enlightenment’s faith in rationality, which was enjoying increasing popularity at the time. Two of the most influential studies of the later eighteenth century exemplifying this tendency were the Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, considéré dans son génie allégorique et dans les allégories auxquelles conduisit ce génie (‘The primitive world analysed and compared with the modern world, considered through its allegorical genius and the allegories which make up this genius’, 1773–82) by Antoine Court de Gébelin, and L’Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle (‘The origin of all cults or universal religion’, 1795) by Charles Dupuis. Both these texts accepted the relevance of occult for the contemporary world, albeit as a realm were truths lay concealed under layers of misguided belief, awaiting revelation under the lens of reason. Court de Gébelin presented his book as a study that ‘would restore in the eyes of the universe the wisdom and intelligence of Primitive People, argue their common 94

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origin, lift the veil that obstructed their understanding, and unite all Nations’. It is thus only by comprehending and deciphering the allegorical spirit of the ancients, he wrote, that one could discover in their narratives ‘an honest, effective and reasoned sensibility’; for, if those narratives were taken at face value as ‘historical’, they would be nothing but ‘an assemblage of indecencies and atrocities’.12 Published in 1795, Dupuis’ Origine des cultes operated in a similar spirit of demystification, but took matters much further into the heart of the Revolutionary ideal, with an explicit political agenda. Dupuis argued that Christianity was the same as all the other religions of the world, where a central figure representing the sun was worshipped as the unifying centre of the universe: ‘The word “God” appeared destined to express the idea of […] the living force that envelops the universe.’13 Having overcome the supposed naivety of all those attempts to make sense of the world transcendentally, Dupuis implied that it was now the role of the political ideal to provide the necessary unifying framework of society. Although the Origine des cultes seemed to break with the fascination of the cryptic, it still treaded the same path as the Monde primitif, in so far as both works not only detected in the past but also projected into the future the idea of a greater unifying order of society, recasting in the language of Reason the meanings of the past. Lenoir’s work at his museum and across his many publications was characterised by a fascination with origins and a quest for a unifying order across mankind, as imprinted in monuments. In his museum, the most striking manifestation of this was the proposed starting point of the displayed history. Although the chronological circuit of the museum technically started with the thirteenth century in the eponymous hall, French art was traced all the way to Antiquity. What Lenoir called the ‘Celtic monuments’, a handful of statues and carvings from early and pre-Christianity placed in that hall, were pivotal despite their perceived stylistic crudeness, as they confirmed the presence of French art at the ‘first stirrings’ of northern European civilisation. As we already saw, the objects in the thirteenth-century hall were the most historically disparate, spanning several centuries, with the emphasis on the concept of ‘beginnings’ rather than the specific character of an era. Furthermore, Lenoir continued to list in all his catalogue editions the twenty-odd Classical sculptures he called ‘archetypes’, which had left his depot early on, swiftly claimed by the Louvre. This implied a link of the museum’s collection and French art as a whole with the Classical ideal, which was still regarded as the highest model of all art. Both these gestures related to a small number of pieces, but were fundamental to the museum’s agenda, as they represented the explosion of history into mythology and the common origins of all civilisations. The section on the absent Classical antiquities in the catalogue extended over 22 pages. In addition to the exhaustive descriptions, Lenoir analysed the uses of these artefacts, their relations with other monuments, the meaning of their inscriptions, their symbolism and so on. At no. III – as these were given Roman numerals – one found a fragment from a Hellenistic funerary stele with carvings of the names of the deceased to whom it was dedicated. This gave Lenoir the opportunity for a comparative etymological analysis, explaining what the names meant in Greek and what their contemporary French equivalents were.14 At nos XII and XXII were a marble statue and relief respectively, showing Bacchus and a festival in his honour. In relation to these 95

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entries, Lenoir discussed the Bacchic myth at length and some of its versions across the world and history, including latter-day France, where Bacchus/Dionysus appeared to have survived as St Denis.15 At no. XIII, and extending over three pages, the marble statue of Meleagros was identified as embodying the ‘character of the beau idéal’, which could also been seen in the Apollo Belvedere and the Antinoos – two of the most celebrated Classical marbles in the Louvre.16 Similarly, entries for the ‘Celtic’ monuments gave rise to discussions of comparative mythology, with emphasis on the continuity between Antiquity and Christianity via the transformation of specific deities from one cult to another. Lenoir referred to a host of ancient historians and brought in ancient and modern debates on theology, genealogy and etymology, in order to substantiate his claims. At no. 2, for example, the fragment of an altar gave rise to an examination of Esus, god of the Gauls, as the Greek Àres, the Roman Mars and the Germanic Erich;17 and at no. 423 (later additions in the collection did not have continuous numbering), a statue of Nehalennia, Celtic goddess from Germany, prompted Lenoir to cite historians as varied as Pausanias, Theocritus and Keysler in order to draw analogies between this goddess and Diana, Isis, Ceres, Minerva and the Virgin Mary via the symbolism of the new moon and the great goddess of Nature.18 A fragment of an eleventh-century mosaic from Saint-Denis depicting the 12 signs of the zodiac, at no. 429, gave Lenoir the opportunity to acknowledge his debt to Dupuis. Embarking on its analysis, Lenoir proposed to compare it to a similar piece in Notre Dame, which his contemporary before him had ‘savantly’ described in his Origin. Lenoir continued by expressing his wish to take a moulding from this and other similar fragments, so he could also display them in his museum, thus facilitating comparative study and paying the hommage due to Dupuis, who had first engaged in the study of these works, demonstrating the continuity between Christianity and ancient cults.19 Proceeding with the analysis of the decorative scheme of the mosaic, Lenoir went on to draw parallels between Horus and Christ as the god of light dying and rising again. This comparative interpretation of iconography continued into more recent works in the museum, such as the sixteenth-century tomb of François I in the introductory hall, where Lenoir identified another Christian manifestation of the universal god of light, in the form of a relief showing Christ as the conqueror of shadows.20 The monument of Philippe de Comines, at no. 93, celebrated as one of the most important historians of the sixteenth century, offered perhaps the most extreme of Lenoir’s associative efforts.21 It was one of his many creative restorations, where further decorative features were added to the central fragment to render it more ‘characterful’. In this case, Lenoir had placed at the foot of Philippe’s statue a relief depicting the mounted St George slaying a winged dragon, which he had copied from an unrelated monument not in the museum. The Journal des Débats criticised this addition, questioning the relevance of the image to the particular historical figure. Lenoir’s response was a long and elaborate justification, where a host of Christian and Muslim fables were brought to bear on the subject, apparently confirming the story of St George and the dragon as yet another manifestation of the universal combat between light and shadows. As such, Lenoir concluded, the allegory of light emerging triumphant was perfect for the commemoration of a celebrated historian of the Renaissance, who embodied the emerging spirit of the Enlightenment.22 96

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From the end of the Revolution until his death, Lenoir delivered several lectures on questions of origins at various learned societies, and published at least eight different texts exploring Egyptian antiquities, as well an explanation of hieroglyphs, which were as yet undeciphered. He also published two separate comparative studies, the first between ancient Egyptian monuments and symbols and those of Greece (1822), and the second between ancient Egyptian, Mexican, and Indian monuments, alongside those ‘of the rest of the ancient world’ (1834). In the latter, he asserted that a great diversity of cults and symbols from Egypt to Japan and Mexico all followed the same ‘logic’ and concealed the same ‘primitive’ truths. Egypt remained of primary significance due to its extreme antiquity and the purity of its representation, but the most important lesson derived from the study was that the common ground between cults and civilisations was undiminished across the ages, confirming the continuity between these originary moments and the contemporary world, ‘through the medium of history’.23 Although Lenoir cited both Montfaucon and Winckelmann as primary influences in his pursuit of history, it is clear that a more significant debt was owed to the likes of Dupuis and de Gébelin24. In their spirit, over and above any historicising agenda, Lenoir aspired to disperse the misleading veils from the faces of the monuments and shed light on their true nature, as a lesson in the development of civilisation and a guide in the construction of the future – to paraphrase de Gébelin. Such a project, investing in the illumination of ‘shadier’ aspects of humanity’s past and arguing for their significance, owed a great deal to Masonic influence. The revival and, in some ways, rehabilitation of modern Freemasonry started in Britain in the 1710s with the formation of Masonic lodges in response to the rapidly secularised culture, as private societies with a strong common ethos and vision to assist with the successful navigation of the new social order. Transported across the Channel in the following two decades, Freemasonry was seen as embodying British values of religious tolerance, social inclusivity and an ideology of merit, as well as progressive politics.25 While still incorporating the ancient, hermetic layers of this vast and complex organisation, including carefully controlled processes of initiation, late eighteenth-century lodges in France had flourished into active social and cultural networks with a strong moral underpinning and intellectual stance, championing progressive principles and far-reaching reforms in politics, education and beyond. Perhaps paradoxically, despite its ancient origins and adherence to seemingly superfluous traditions and rituals, Freemasonry in Europe, and France in particular, was indeed a cradle of Enlightenment ideas and a force towards modernity.26 More importantly, however, in addition to its progressive, pragmatic outlook, Freemasonry offered something that was otherwise sidelined in the cultural and social realities of Enlightenment France, both pre- and post-Revolution: this was the transcendental dimension, the sense of endurance and continuity beyond the vicissitudes of history and the transience of human temporality. The rituals and myths sustaining the Masonic tradition and their implications were highly attractive to contemporary culture. This was not the ‘regressive’ religion of the Ancien Régime, which was becoming increasingly incompatible with intellectual pursuits even after its official restoration, but a rather more enlightened belief in mankind’s search for legitimacy within the order of 97

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nature. James Stevens Curl has argued convincingly that Freemasonry’s popularity at the time was largely owed to its promise of a recovery of ‘eternal verities and ageless serenities’ from the origins of mankind;27 its promise, in other words, to compensate for the sense of loss and uncertainty accompanying the modernisation of culture, felt especially keenly after the trauma of the Revolution and its attempt at a tabula rasa. A large number of men of letters, politicians and other prominent figures of the period were Freemasons, including Court de Gébelin, Quatremère de Quincy, and Alexandre Lenoir himself. Lenoir, a member of the lodge of Saint-Jean d’Écosse du Contrat Social, published a dissertation on the movement in 1814, entitled La FrancheMaçonnerie rendue à sa véritable origine, ou l’Antiquité de la Franche-Maçonnerie prouvée par l’explication des mystères anciens et modernes (‘Freemasonry traced to its true origin, or the Antiquity of Freemasonry proven by the explication of ancient and modern mysteries’). This was based on a series of lectures he had given at the Celtic Academy on the relationship between the ancient mysteries of Egypt and Greece with those of Freemasonry. Following Court de Gébelin closely, Lenoir intended to reveal ‘the true sense of the sacred allegories presented to the uninitiated as historic accounts and tales of heroism’, using the symbols of Freemasonry as a sort of deciphering code; for these are a ‘perfect picture of the active forces of the Universe and a book wherein lie inscribed the morals of all people’.28 The emblems of the goddess Isis and other Egyptian deities, for example, adopted as Masonic symbols since the movement’s beginnings, could also be traced all the way to French Gothic ornaments and beyond. ‘We must not be surprised to see our temples decorated with emblems from Egypt’, wrote Lenoir, or with ‘signs of the zodiac and other symbols related to this primitive cult, as demonstrated in the churches of Our Lady in Paris and Strasbourg, and at the abbey of Saint-Denis’.29 Artistic and architectural styles were perfect communicators of the deeper affinity and common roots of all mankind’s beliefs and rituals, and this applied as much to figures of worship as to ornamental details, such as the vine motif and the ogive, which played an equally important part in maintaining this continuity.30 Ultimately, Lenoir proposed Freemasonry as a shield against religious fanaticism and despotism, which united all people in a social contract of bienfaisance, arising out of Freemasonry’s inalienable origins in deepest Oriental Antiquity and the cult of nature.31 The force of this statement – and the essay as a whole – lies in the seamless binding of the Enlightenment ideal of a universal social contract for a new, secular and progressive order of things with the most ancient and inaccessible mysteries of the past. Through such writings, Lenoir was aligning himself with an intellectual tendency of increasing urgency that required from the Enlightenment not just an abstract promise for the future, but one that also had concrete roots in the past, for all the difficulty and even paradox such a task might comprise. In this light, the relevance of Lenoir’s affiliation with Freemasonry for his work can be seen to transcend the specificity of any local Masonic agendas and relate to a much bigger picture, which Freemasonry was simply better positioned to address. With human civilisation becoming richer in meaning as it extended back towards its origins, on one hand, and the contemporary age’s unique privilege of perfect reasoning, on the other, the increasingly uncertain future was sought to be defined through a kind 98

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of intellectual archaeology, an attempt to distil significance from the restructuring and reinterpretation of images and concepts from the past. The key feature of this operation was the assumed underlying unity of all phenomena, and the attempt to, simultaneously, acknowledge its continuation in the contemporary age and transform it into something more appropriate for an enlightened age. Ultimately, the quest for origins was the crux of the project of historical invention, which was itself a quest for order, one manifested through history yet impervious to the vicissitudes of epochs, distinguishing the specificity of the nation and its people while legitimising it through a causal link with the established archetypes; an order, in other words, capable of upholding identity through difference and sustaining the particular through the universal. Speaking Monuments National history was an abstract concept more easily grasped through the palpable body of material heritage. Similarly, the quest for origins favoured concrete manifestations of the remote past to gain purchase. The architectural monument was singled out in this respect, being at once the most evident survivor from such distant times and one richly invested with cultural significance. Furthermore, architecture’s ability to concentrate and divulge meaning through a parallel with language had become a greatly influential theory by the end of the century. The identification of a linguistic structure in architecture was concretised in Germain Boffrand’s Livre d’architecture (‘Book of architecture’) of 1745. In this work, architectural principles were directly drawn from Horace’s Art of Poetry, transposing the link between image and text to buildings.32 This expansion of the idea of ut pictura poesis into architecture had profound consequences for the development of the discipline itself, but also for its role in the understanding of the past. The idea that surviving buildings, or fragments thereof, could be read like complex, three-dimensional pictographs was the assumption that contributed most to the role of architecture in the quest for origins. The analyses and comparative studies of ancient monuments, aiming to establish their common underlying themes, rested on the basic principle that these works carried in encoded form – in their proportions, forms, ornaments and so on – condensed information about their society, which could be deciphered more or less like a text. Furthermore, this mode of representation exceeded natural language in terms of its capacity and breadth. Rousseau had written in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (‘Essay on the origin of languages’) that the most energetic language was the one where the sign had said it all before one spoke, referring to the widespread idea that visual symbolic communication was privileged because of its density and comprehensibility. In that way, through the symbolic devices of the monument, a wealth of secrets could be securely communicated in perpetuity, to the select few who understood the codes. This idea held a particular fascination for Lenoir’s contemporaries, as it placed them in the role of that privileged posterity that could decipher those secrets and establish truths across history. The intriguing implication of this was that all these ‘monumental’ works of art and architecture were thought of as made for this purpose – that is, from their 99

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inception, they were somehow prepared as highly condensed, symbolic records of their times with a view to passing on their ideas. Court de Gébelin was one of the many who accompanied his quest for origins with the conviction that the symbolism and allegory of monumental language were the keys to historical interpretation.33 The crucial aspect of the allegorical language of monuments, and the key to its privileged communicative capacity, was identified as its aesthetic character – that is, the fact that it became effective as experience of the senses, and not just through the engagement of the spirit. This thesis was formulated on the basis of sensationist theory, originating in John Locke’s seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which posited the primacy of sense experience for the acquisition of knowledge, and became increasingly influential throughout the eighteenth century. In France, it was Étienne de Condillac who contributed most to this influence with the near-identically entitled Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (‘Essay on the origin of human knowledge’, 1746), a document of almost canonical status by Lenoir’s time. Condillac’s work was an elaboration on Locke’s, arguing that the mode of knowing offered through the senses was more encompassing than rationality, and thus confirming emotion and imagination as legitimate media for the construction of meaning.34 The Abbot de Lubersac’s Discours sur les monuments publics de tous les ages et de tous les peuples (‘Discourse on public monuments of all ages and peoples’, 1775) was one of the first comparative studies of monuments in view of determining universal origins, which invested in the idea that sensually perceived images should excite in the observer sentiments analogous to the purpose and meaning of the monuments. But it was Le Camus de Mezières’ Le Génie d’architecture ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (‘The Genius of architecture or the analogy of this art with our sensations’, 1780) which first articulated systematically the way in which architectural form could directly evoke sensations. De Mezières maintained that this was a relationship based on the nature of perception, arising from nature itself, which made it necessary to follow the appropriate principles in order to render architecture communicative and relevant. By appealing directly to our soul, through aesthetic experience and its ensuing emotions, the physiognomy of the work would ‘speak’ its character to the spectator, more directly and eloquently than any secondary articulation ever could. The Museum of Monuments invested in these ideas heavily, with Lenoir’s fabriques being the most pronounced examples. If the truths of history could be communicated holistically to the mind and soul of the spectator through certain symbolic structures, by manipulating creatively those structures one could improve and enhance this communication. The notion of vraisemblance (‘verisimilitude’) arising out of seventeenthcentury literature and theatre but underpinning much of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory captured this perfectly: the ideal monument was to be vraisemblable – that is, truer to the character it was meant to represent than any original. Rather than simple representation, the role of the monument was more of an enhanced exemplification. The fabricated monument-as-allegory ‘spoke’ of its subject even better than an authentic monument would, being a construct made with hindsight and for the sole purpose of consolidating and re-presenting a certain character, of an epoch or person. As Dominique Poulot puts it, this was the monument as it ‘should’ have been, rather 100

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than as it ever was.35 From the visually simpler tributes to worthy artists to complex constructs like the cenotaph of Diane de Poitier, Lenoir’s fabriques were less objects for admiration and more encoded narratives for reading. Adding the sculpted figures of a little dog, an Eros in the process of writing, four sphinx heads, the enamelled portraits of her lovers Henri and François and four caryatids to Diane’s monument, for example, Lenoir encoded in a single artefact the key features of this woman’s character and life, as he saw them. Beyond individual monuments, the museum as a whole could be seen as a carefully constructed fabrique. Lenoir’s meticulous attention lavished on the architectural detail and decoration of the halls, and his emphasis on the scenographic integration of exhibits, rooms and garden, rendered the whole into a totalising experience and one large, speaking monument. His aim to convey the ‘character’ of each era above all else led him to bring together otherwise disparate forms, ideas and fragments, from wherever he could find them, in order to compose the appropriate aesthetic experience as he saw it. The twilit vaults of the thirteenth-century hall, or the brightly coloured arabesques of the fourteenth-century ceiling and the glorious stained glass windows of the sixteenthcentury hall, the purpose-built niches covering the fourteenth-century hall carrying opulently dressed saints and princes, or the sombre Neoclassical busts of poets and philosophers aligning the bright eighteenth-century stretch of the cloister were among the multiple devices which Lenoir used throughout to enhance the eloquence of his museum. When he wrote that he wanted to give to his halls ‘the exact character and physiognomy of the century they each represent’, it would seem he was following architect Claude-Nicholas Ledoux’s advice – the latter being a famous exponent of ‘speaking architecture’ in both his writings and buildings.36 Ledoux wrote instructing his colleagues to adhere closely to the symbolic systems apparently governing each aspect of their work, as poets do with their verse and metaphor, in order to ensure that ‘not a single stone in their constructs would remain mute’ and that ‘the thoughts of those perceiving them would be appropriately instructed and elevated’.37 Lenoir’s catalogues played an important role in this, as they offered the necessary background for the visitor to engage successfully in the reading of the museum. It is important to understand that the relationship of text to artefact was not that of an instrumental ‘code’ for deciphering the language of the monuments, as this would have defeated the purpose. As already mentioned, the language of the speaking monument operated over and above that of natural language, in a combination of intellectual and affective engagement, between perception, memory and imagination. On the other hand, for this to take place, the observer needed to be ‘in the know’ – that is, to have a prior understanding of the monument’s context. It is this prior knowledge that the catalogues were providing, in order to allow the visitors to become fully immersed in the monuments’ narratives. Ultimately, what Lenoir was after with his museum was truth, not authenticity. Despite the latter notion’s association with objectivity and the scientific method – as manifested in the nascent science of archaeology – it remained an essentially fragmented concept with little relevance to interpretation. Lenoir was seeking, instead, an overarching meaning to unify his disparate fragments into a coherent narrative. In other words, he 101

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was seeking a philosophical rather than scientific confirmation for the significance of his collection, which he would communicate to his visitors through emplotment and participation, rather than didactically. With the Museum of Monuments, Lenoir was attempting to erect the speaking monument par excellence – in fact, to borrow Domique Poulot’s expression, not simply a ‘speaking’ monument, but ‘a proper chatterbox’.38 Beyond Great Men Another important layer in the museum’s pursuit of history was the specific commemoration of noteworthy French personalities from across the centuries. The idea of ‘great men’ was a relatively novel concept, aligned with the shift in understanding of collective identity and the construction of the nation. The concept had already taken root earlier in the century, as exemplified by the proposal in the 1770s of the count d’Angivillier, Director of Royal Estates, for a new gallery in the Louvre featuring statues of such men.39 But it was an idea warmly appropriated by the Revolution, during which it become a veritable cult, as it was ideally suited to the rejection of hereditary hierarchies and the traditional paradigm which supported them. The king, who traditionally represented collective identity, was not significant as an individual, but as an idea, a symbolic structure around which the culture was woven, and in which the specific personality largely dissolved. By contrast, the great man was the exceptional individual who had proved himself (rarely herself ) through that exceptional individuality and ‘genius’. On one level, the idea of great men was a totalising and abstracting one. The exemplary temple to great men, the Revolutionary Pantheon, was a severe and grandiose place, appropriately embodying the concept. The Pantheon had been converted from Soufflot’s church of Sainte-Geneviève during 1791–94, a project in which Quatremère de Quincy had been involved himself during his brief spell as member of the Legislative Assembly. The great men here were significant in the plural, as a collective that defined the spirit of the nation at its most ahistorical and essential. As Mona Ozouf points out, death had no place in this representation – great men were immortal.40 One could also add that their immortality was granted to them as a group, defined exclusively by those mutually shared, sublimated characteristics which identified them as ‘great’. The Pantheon did not celebrate individual men, but the idea they all represented, an idea eternal and unchanging, despite the fact that the men had been mortal. In that sense, the Pantheon was neither a cemetery nor a church, museum, garden nor archive; it was a shell that contained the collective spirit of these men, understood as a death- and timedefying space complete in and of itself. On a second level, the idea of the great man in the singular relied on the concept of individual genius. This was not a property that all men could conceivably possess, but distinguished, instead, a fundamentally unique type of individual. One was a genius, rather than possessing genius. The entire psyche of the genius was of primary interest, his emotional capacities and intuition overshadowing his intellect. K.S. Jaffe pronounces this as the turning point in the idea and the clear prefiguring of the dominant nineteenth-century understanding of the word.41 Jaffe 102

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points out that this genius was captured by his own poetic representations, and that the only way to understand him was to look inside him. Having moved to the opposite pole to the ancient poet, who could only compose if inspired by a divine spirit, the Romantic genius inspired his own. All external factors having become irrelevant, this extraordinary individual represented the ultimate self-reference. Although these two aspects of the idea of great men, in the plural and singular, were largely complementary, there was a distinctly different emphasis on the role of individuality between them, which is of particular interest to the discussion of the Museum of Monuments. One of the key aspects of the whole project at the Petits-Augustins was the attempt to show the figures represented there in a more personal light. As we have already seen, Lenoir went to great lengths to present these figures as distinct personalities, through details of their lives outside the abstract realm of historical and national ‘greatness’. For example, wherever possible, he would attribute to the royals represented in the collection occupations, sensitivities and even flaws, revealing them as real human beings beyond their royal status. Already from the earliest centuries represented in the museum, the attempt at personalisation was evident. In the ‘Medieval Monuments’ section of the catalogue, at no. 5, one found the stylistically unusual sepulchral monument to Dagobert I, installed in the Elysium. This king, it appeared, had distinguished himself in the wars against the Gascons and Bretons, but he tarnished his victories through ‘terrible cruelties’ and a licentious lifestyle involving numerous women.42 In the thirteenth-century hall, a statue of Louis IX was accompanied by lengthy praise of the man’s character. His institution of laws against blasphemy and duels aside, he was truly a virtuous and courageous man, who was ‘compassionate for all the world despite his own misery’. In this last phrase, Lenoir must have been referring to the tragic death of both of Louis’ sons before him, whose mausolea, built by the king, were also in the same hall of the museum.43 In the fifteenth-century hall, the tomb of Pierre de Navarre provided Lenoir with an opportunity to reminisce about the prince’s father, Charles II, also known as Charles Le Mauvais (‘the Ugly’), who did not possess a monument in the museum, but in whom Lenoir was clearly more interested because of several intriguing anecdotes about his life. It would appear, according to Lenoir, that the king had requested to be wrapped from head to toe in bandages soaked in an alcoholic solution in order to relieve an ailment, and a careless servant holding a candle accidentally set him alight.44 Still in the same hall, the monuments of Philippe d’Orléans and Charles VI gave Lenoir the opportunity to recall the former’s considerable poetic talents with an entire ballad attributed to the prince quoted in the catalogue, and the latter’s fondness for card games. It appeared that the unfortunate Charles had suffered sunstroke that deprived him of the power of reason, after having been a particularly wise and competent ruler. Nevertheless, he retained his life-long love for cards, which were invented during his rule. This is why, added Lenoir, when he was restoring the statue of the king which was missing a right hand, he felt justified in replacing it with one holding some playing cards.45 The bust of Charles VIII in the sixteenth-century hall was an opportunity for Lenoir to recount the extraordinary story of his first wife, Marguerite of Austria. She was the only daughter of Maximilian I, to whom Charles returned her shortly after the wedding without having 103

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consummated the marriage. While Charles went on to marry Marie de Bourgogne, Marguerite’s hand was requested by Ferdinand and Isabelle of Spain for their son. On the way to Spain, the boat carrying her nearly sank, so the princess, convinced she was going to die and showing ‘a courage uncommon to her sex’, composed her own epitaph: ‘Here lies Margot, the gentle maiden / Who had two husbands yet died a virgin.’46 A similar story of extraordinary courage in the face of death was associated with the monument to the constable of François I, Anne de Montmorency, placed in the introductory hall. The constable had proven an intrepid warrior in a number of battles, not least in his last, at Saint-Denis. Having received eight grave wounds, wrote Lenoir, this man of 74 years gathered all his might and killed an enemy officer. Finally, a Scottish gentleman dealt him a fatal blow, but not before Montmorency had managed to break two of the Scotsman’s front teeth.47 One of the key personalities of the sixteenth century in the museum was undoubtedly Diane de Poitiers, ‘a woman famous for her love-life as much as her talent in affairs of government’. In all three pieces directly associated with her in the museum – her cenotaph, the portico of her home at Anet and the fountain representing her as Diana the Huntress – Lenoir took the opportunity to muse on her talents and to recall episodes of her life. Several pages were dedicated to recounting how her nobility and beauty charmed François I when, still a young girl, she implored him to spare her captive father’s life; how the rumours of the elderly king having demanded her virginity as a price could not have been true because ‘a noble knight, friend of the sciences and the arts, would not have sullied his life by such an odious act’; and how this ‘adorable woman’ subsequently seduced Henri II, who became her lover and commissioned the magnificent refurbishment of her residence at Anet, calling to the task the greatest talents of the time, such as Goujon, Cousin, Bullant, de l’Orme and Pilon.48 The most striking and popular of all personal stories recounted in the museum, however, was undoubtedly the one attached to the tomb of Héloïse and Abélard. Lenoir started the catalogue’s long section devoted to the piece with a disclaimer, stating that by erecting this monument, he was not trying to recount the actual story of the tragic lovers, as Clio (the muse of history) had already done this. Instead, what he wished was for the visitors to read the admirable verses of Alexander Pope and Charles-Pierre Colardeau in order to come and recite them at the feet of this sanctuary. Quite openly, therefore, this monument eschewed history-as-fact in order to invest in an empathetic experience with the past. Mentioning the inscription he placed on the tomb, ‘Forever joined’, Lenoir continued: ‘Within their marble tomb, they love each other forever, these adoring spouses; one seems to hear escaping from the stone that covers them sighs of tenderness and of love.’ Lenoir concluded his long, lyrical discussion of the piece in the catalogue by emphasising the indissoluble link between the lovers that this monument firmly established, thus implying a happy conclusion of sorts to the unhappy story.49 The investment in personality and biographical detail at the Museum of Monuments related to the contemporary fascination with theories of physiognomy – most notably those of J.K. Lavater. As we saw in Chapter 2, visitors’ accounts suggest that they observed with great interest the facial features of the statues, attempting to relate them to character traits, in tune with the represented figure’s life and deeds. Lenoir himself 104

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encouraged this in a number of ways. He provided the sculptor Deseine with the actual skull of Héloïse in order for her likeness to be captured as closely as possible on her effigies, in the absence of an original image. He also repeatedly referred in the catalogue to the characteristics of various figures in relation to their features – relating them also to their effect on the spectator. He wrote, for example, that ‘the eyes of Charles IX are still livid and on his forehead appears, like an aura, all the blood that he has spilled’. Lenoir went on to sympathise with Germain Pilon, the statue’s celebrated sculptor, for having to endure such a face while working on it.50 The ‘cortège of assassins’ in the sixteenth-century hall included Birague and Catherine de Medici – the latter disguising her crimes behind the ‘seductive smile colouring her lips’. But, thankfully, the visitor then encountered Montaigne, whose features would ‘calm one’s memories’ from the horrors implied in the previous images. A little further, the features of Chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital lying in his tomb were the embodiment of the honour and glory of his century, inviting the visitor’s reverence and adoration.51 The most extreme manifestation of the investment in personality at the Museum of Monuments, however, was the interest in human remains. Far from merely being viewed with morbid fascination, relics of the famous or the merely interesting enjoyed great popularity at the time, and their collection was taken very seriously. The massive exhumations of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis in 1793 fuelled this trend on a grand scale, both in terms of spectacle and actual material. People were not just eager to observe the minute details of the royal corpses’ physiognomies, but also fascinated by their materiality, the state of preservation of their skin, nails and teeth, the colour of their hair, and so on. Both Lenoir and Dom Poirier, the official emissary of the Commission of Monuments, reported in detail on the corpses themselves. Lenoir included a full account of the events in his sixth catalogue edition, the Description of year X, entitled ‘Notes historiques sur les exhumations faites en 1793 dans l’abbaye de Saint-Denis’ (‘Historical notes on the exhumations carried out in 1793 at the abbey of Saint-Denis’). One read, for example, how the impressively preserved body of Turenne became an object of continuous fascination, displayed first by the warden of the destroyed abbey, who also sold relics to visitors, and then at the Museum of Natural History, before finally being entombed at the Invalides via a brief residence at the Museum of Monuments. Also, that one of France’s most popular kings, Henri IV, was equally well preserved, and was kept for two days in the abbey before being thrown into the communal limepit. During that time, the impression of his face was taken on a cloth, but so were bits of his anatomy, like parts of his beard, teeth and toenails, by a number of fascinated bystanders. A similar treatment awaited other well-preserved bodies, such as Louis XIV, who, however, being so reviled during that stage of the Revolution, was not such a popular choice with relic mongers, and had only one toenail extracted by a man who actually jumped in the pit with him to get it at the last minute.52 It was not just the general public that was fascinated by human remains. The collection of relics enjoyed popularity among the highest classes of society and the educated. Respectable travel guides would give details of venues where one might purchase such pieces with a certificate of authenticity.53 Louis XVIII himself, apparently, was given the aforementioned toenail of his more famous predecessor, Louis XIV, as a congratulatory 105

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gesture upon his ascension to the throne in 1815. Dominique Vivant-Denon, director of Parisian museums from 1802 to 1814, was the proud owner of an entire cabinet of relics that included, among other objects, a bit of Henri IV’s moustache, bones of Molière and La Fontaine, a tooth of Voltaire and some of the ashes of Héloïse. It is no coincidence that Lenoir also held remains of most of these personalities in the Petits-Augustins, linked to the most popular of his exhibits. His own role as an entrepreneur in this trade aside, Lenoir understood the importance of relics for his museum and its crucial investment in personality. It is not hard to imagine that a tomb actually containing the remains of the person it commemorated would have elicited a more visceral and immediate response from the visitor than an empty monument. The sudden implication of the physical reality of death in those monuments would have dramatically shifted the character of the visit from the realm of abstractions such as art, history and progress to something deeply experiential and personal. Lenoir’s personalities were not ‘great men’ in the sense of the Pantheon, hence the emphasis on figures like Héloïse and Abélard, Diane de Poitiers and many others who had no claim to conventional greatness. Lenoir wanted to allow for a different kind of order to emerge in his history, one of character and emotions, beyond the established, Pantheon-like definition. Beyond courage, dignity and virtue in battle or in affairs of the state, history was also woven through simpler human tragedy and fortitude, through passion, love, hatred and cruelty. In this scheme, therefore, it was not enough to reveal the human side of great figures; it was also essential that a host of lesser characters were presented and celebrated precisely for their humanity. Taking in the remote with the proximate, the personally remembered with the mythical, all in a continuously unfolding immersive experience, would encourage the visitors to empathise further with the represented personalities and to feel, themselves, as participants in the display and the ongoing narrative of French history. Eternity in the Garden It is already clear that the kind of history presented by the Museum of Monuments was a much more complex narrative than a mere histoire raisonée – an analytical timeline tracing the development of the newly defined nation. Lenoir’s project opened up modes for engagement that embraced sentiment, curiosity and ambiguity – dimensions well beyond the Enlightenment canon. Those characteristics were nowhere more eloquent than in the museum’s garden, the Elysium. Even Louis Courajod, despite being the greatest apologist for the project, calling it ‘the most beautiful museum of modern sculpture in Europe’ (when several others already existed), dismissed the Elysium as somewhat of a charlatanerie, and Lenoir’s rare moment of weakness.54 However, beyond its apparent incongruity with the more ordered halls, the garden operated as a cornerstone for the whole project, supporting the legitimacy of the museum’s main themes by situating them in nature. In keeping with the period’s garden design, Lenoir’s Elysium was a picturesque landscape composed of trees and monuments interspersed among meandering 106

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pathways. Known as a jardin anglais (‘English garden’), this type had originated in England in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and had become hugely popular, spreading across Europe in the following decades. Drawing directly on the tradition of the picturesque, the laborious construct of the English garden was concealed behind a ‘natural’ appearance of undulating lawns and un-manicured woodland, in seeming opposition to the more obvious artifice of the highly geometricised seventeenthcentury French gardens.55 The English style also required that, amidst the lawns and trees, one would find reminders of civilisation in the form of small pavilions in the shape of Classical temples, sculptures, fake Gothic ruins or structures like water cascades – all without practical purpose, and thus commonly named ‘follies’ – scattered strategically so as to enhance both the pictorial and narrative qualities of the garden. There were several jardins anglais in France, which Lenoir would certainly have known, such as the Jardin Monceau in Paris, realised in the early the 1770s by theatre designer Charmontelle and featuring a wide variety of follies, or fabriques as they were known in France, and matching planting, meant to evoke exotic locations, interspersed in the wooded landscape. Meandering routes would encourage the visitor to explore and have various ‘unexpected’ encounters.56 Perhaps the most influential such garden in France at the time, however, was a fictional place, featured in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s popular novel Julie: ou La nouvelle Héloïse of 1761. This idealised landscape represented the new sensibilities of later eighteenth-century France as pertaining to the experience of nature and its relevance in the life of the bourgeois. It concretised the jardin anglais by representing nature as natura naturans, the creative power and origin of humanity, and balancing ‘other’ of civilisation. With his entire opus, Rousseau represented such a return to nature as the source of purity and virtue, where the individual found recourse from the excesses and confusion of civilised life, and where one escaped in order to seek oneself. Rousseau’s garden, and the jardin anglais in general, favoured reverie and flights of fancy. The importance of imagination as a primary faculty for engagement with the world was a central aspect of the experience, with allegory the favoured means of communicating ideas. Despite its pictorial origins, the picturesque garden aimed to offer an unfolding spectacle rather than a fixed frame. The visitors were expected to move through the setting to appreciate it, in a perambulation resembling the perusal of a picture book. The experience unfolded through a long promenade of the reflecting or conversing characters through the landscape. The designation ‘Elysée’, which Lenoir chose for his garden, derived from the original Elysian Fields of ancient Greece, where the most worthy of mortals were thought to dwell in the afterlife. The Fields were described as a shady and peaceful landscape, and often as an island isolated from the rest of world.57 In the context of the eighteenth century, the term ‘Elysium’ was associated and often used interchangeably with the jardin anglais, in reference to this ancient, paradise-like place’s evocation of the idealised purity and virtue of nature. However, the term’s specific associations with death and an extra-temporal ‘afterlife’ are of particular relevance to Lenoir’s project. With the shift of attitudes towards death in the eighteenth century, the tomb as an object acquired a certain autonomy from its individual and religious designations, operating as a generalised memento mori and secular invitation for philosophical reflection. In the 107

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garden, the tomb as mnemonic device/monument assumed a heightened significance, through association with timeless, all-embracing nature and the implications of a common ground between the living and the dead. As with his fictional Elysium, Rousseau’s own burial place at Ermenonville, created in the late 1770s by the Marquis de Girardin, was a prominent such example, where reminders of the temporariness of human life and the eternal character of virtue were combined in idyllic nature to create one of the nation’s most celebrated landscapes. Elizabeth MacArthur argues that the philosopher’s Neoclassical sepulchre, placed in the midst of a poplar-lined islet, represented Rousseau’s memory projected into the future, as ‘the nation’s promise to be worthy of his ashes, to become “humains et libres”’.58 She suggests that the location of the sepulchre in this Elysian landscape succeeded in communicating the transition from remembrance to promise more effectively than the Pantheon itself, where Rousseau’s remains were later transferred. The cyclical temporality of nature, in an eternal return of decay and renewal, evoked continuity between past and future, in which the visitors could participate through a ‘present’ simultaneously affective and transcendental. The combination of garden and tomb captured a host of contemporary concerns about the nature of mankind, its past and its future, thus becoming a privileged and popular medium for engagement with these ideas. The garden of the Museum of Monuments adhered to the tropes of such Elysian landscapes, but what rendered it unique was its contingency upon the museum as a whole. It would be a mistake to think of Lenoir’s Elysium as somehow separate from the curatorial vision of the project, or a respite from the more serious business of the halls. The garden operated as an essential complement to the historical structure of the display, by positing nature as the enduring and unifying ground of all mankind, across the vicissitudes of history. In the museum’s halls, the gradual unfolding of spectacle brought the idea of history to an immediate, experiential level. The visitor had to travel the narrative over time, to discover it rather than capture it instantaneously. Even in the introductory hall, the only instance of ‘overview’ in the building, the entire historical presence of the nation was tantalisingly glimpsed as a preview and promise of what was to follow, urging the visitor to continue, rather than implying self-containment. The temporal extension of the visit to the museum mirrored that of the great historical narrative of the nation, demanding an engagement with the movement of history and the temporality of its personalities, in order to begin revealing its timeless ideals. In the Elysium, this incremental narrative dissolved in the perpetuity of nature, which operated both as memory of idealised origins and anticipation of a future worthy of the virtue represented here. The timeless ideals emerging from the landscape of history, as set out in the halls, were thus consolidated in the landscape of nature as the cradle of history. Unlike the introductory hall – the only other non-chronological space of the museum – the monuments in the Elysium were not presented as a preview of the nation’s artistic accomplishment through the centuries, nor were they offered as a spectacular composition in a single view, to intrigue and entice. Every monument in the garden was commemorative, with a considerable bias towards personalities from the past two 108

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centuries, including men of the arts and letters such as Descartes, Rohault, Boileau, Molière, La Fontaine, Mabillon and Montfaucon and a variety of lesser, more recent figures, relevant at the time. There were fewer but significant representations of earlier centuries and the field of war and politics, such as Constable Anne de Montmorency, General Turenne, the courtesan Diane de Poitier, King Dagobert I and, of course, Héloïse and Abélard. Lenoir wrote a lengthy explication of his garden under the title ‘Observations sur l’Élysée’ (‘Observations on the Elysium’), which was published in the fifth volume of the Musée des monumens français, his other ongoing publishing project, appearing alongside the various editions of the museum’s official catalogue.59 Confirming the key role of Origin theory for his project, Lenoir traced the idea of the Elysium back to Antiquity, and then embarked on a lengthy consideration of the various manifestations of the Elysium from Antiquity to the present, through Homer, Plato, Virgil, Lucian, Fénélon, Poussin and others.60 The latter, suggested Lenoir, was one of the earliest moderns to have captured the essence of the Elysium, as it would be relevant for the era of the Enlightenment.61 But it was a contemporary of Lenoir who articulated the idea more fully. As the curator himself wrote, this man, through ‘a work dedicated to the happiness of the human species […] under the modest title of Esquisse, has bequeathed us the image of a true Elysium’.62 Although the philosopher was not named, Lenoir was obviously referring to the Marquis de Condorcet and his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (‘Sketch of a historical view of the progress of the human spirit’) of 1793. Lenoir extolled Condorcet’s Elysium at length, writing that it was not about vain pleasures, but instead the reward of virtue measured according to principles of reason, the defence of liberty, the incessant toil against human error, and yet also the love of humanity. This paean to Enlightenment ideals should not surprise, despite its reference to what might appear as the most ‘romantic’ of the museum’s spaces. With the absence of a chronological circuit to posit the experience as ‘historical’ – ostensibly the museum’s aim and its legitimising ideal – it would be easy for the Elysium to collapse into irrelevance and to be seen as a mere add-on to the visit, a pleasure garden for relaxation after the educational rigours of the halls, or even to be seen as distracting from the seriousness of the museum’s agenda, as was the case for Courajod.63 By projecting Condorcet’s philosophical Elysium onto it, Lenoir was asserting that the same operation begun in the halls was continuing here, albeit in modified format. Following the ‘eternal chain of human affairs’, as set out in the halls, the visitor was offered ‘refuge’ from the perpetuity of human struggle in a place where the emphasis on the remains of the virtuous from across the nation’s history, placed in the embrace of nature, would herald the re-establishment of man on a higher plane, as befits ‘his rights and the dignity of his nature’.64 The implication was that the museum’s garden was also about history, but as the order of history and the temporality of mankind situated within that of the natural world. In that sense, history in the garden extended into the originary realm of the eternal, linking human history to the primordial ground of natura naturans. Lenoir elaborated further on the rewarding effect of the Elysium as a natural extension to the historical project of the Museum of Monuments. He wrote that it was as if the personalities honoured there had received a new life, sharing in a common and 109

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inalterable joy, and that ‘a sweet and novel emotion’ would overcome him every time his steps would lead him into this ‘august enclosure’. More than any reward, Lenoir added, he would cherish being able to instil this emotion in the souls of his readers and visitors, alongside the same ‘holy respect for the Enlightenment, for talent and virtue’ which led him to form his project in the first place.65 The emotion Lenoir implied was none other than melancholy, as he had already stated in an earlier museum catalogue.66 This sentiment was very much in keeping with the spirit of the jardin anglais and the newly acquired significance of cemeteries as public spaces, in the context of the period’s changing attitudes towards death.67 Melancholy had become quite a popular concept in different areas of late eighteenth-century French culture, ranging from garden design to social attitudes and politics, transforming strands of Enlightenment thought into what would develop into its seeming opposite, Romanticism.68 In the context of Lenoir’s museum, this apparent shift from reason to emotion was actually a complementarity, drawing from sensationist theory to offer a novel experience. The coupling of sentiment and thought in an immersive environment confirms once more the hybrid nature of the project and its totalising aspirations, as well as asserting the relevance of an Elysium for this museum. An expanded version of the ‘Observations sur l’Elysée’ was included in Lenoir’s dissertation on Freemasonry eight years later (1814), as part of the greater exploration of ancient myths and symbols, and their survival in contemporary Masonic practices. This inclusion signifies that Lenoir saw the Elysium as the most relevant space of his museum with regard to his study of Freemasonry – that is, the analysis and exposition of origins and ancient themes enduring through the centuries. The Elysium complemented and completed Lenoir’s project, being as much about history as it was beyond history. It made possible the contemplation of history as a landscape from a higher, enduring ground, which simultaneously offered promise for the future and legitimacy for the past. Although this was true for the museum as a whole, the Elysium was the space most explicitly aspiring to transcend history and become a ‘site of memory’, to borrow Pierre Nora’s expression, a space no longer of mediated re-presentation, but of direct and perpetual presence.69 Mythopoesis Despite its rhetoric, the Museum of Monuments was not about the progress of history. Although the catalogue introduction heralded an imminent brave new world that would restore society and culture to its glory, the museum remained focused on the significance of history as a dialectics of continuity and change, rather than committed to teleology. The experience set up across the Petits-Augustins relied on the ‘progress’ of time and culture as a structuring tool, an initiation to a process rather than its essence. On the backbone of the chronological sequence, a great tapestry of visual, intellectual and emotional detail was woven, simultaneously highlighting it as a process and concealing its end. Each hall as a whole, through its decor, arrangement and catalogue text, was presented as much as a link on a chain as it was a total environment, an 110

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absorbing context in itself. This repeated and drastic shift of focus and scale, weaving between movement and stasis, microcosm and macrocosm, was a clear challenge to the relentless linearity and simplicity of progress. The layout of the museum itself was a loop. Starting at the introductory hall and ending at the seventeenth-century hall, the visitor would have covered three of the four sides of the cloistered quadrangle – the fourth side consisting of two more rooms that Lenoir envisaged converting into the eighteenthand nineteenth-century halls, but never did. In other words, by the end of the visit, one was back at the beginning. The visit was then meant to continue and conclude at the Elysium garden – the greatest challenge to chronology in the whole project. In the garden, the idea of progress retreated further, fragmented by the openness of the layout, the encouragement to wander and stop at will, the enhanced investment on emotional engagement, and finally, the fundamental ahistoricity of nature. The investment in a range of individual personalities in this process was a challenge both to a purely historicist and a purely commemorative agenda. The passage of time would come to a halt in front of flawed royal personages, artists of varying worth and lesser mortals alike, where attention shifted towards the microcosm of the individual life and the temporality of human emotion. Unlike the Pantheon, exclusively dedicated to the celebration of virtue, the Museum of Monuments presented a rich tapestry of human life, celebrating its endurance and ever-elusive yet ever-present sense of identity and order. Nature featured as history’s culmination and ‘corrective’, and human sentiment triumphed over temporal distance and death. This simultaneous operation across scales –historical and ahistorical, personal and universal – was essential to the museum’s overarching search for order. On one hand, the perpetual process of change and development distanced the specificity of the past, while allowing the future to be anticipated as ‘new’ and full of hope. On the other hand, the common ground sustaining this change guaranteed the continuity and unity of the whole operation – so such historical ‘minutiae’ as Héloïse and Abélard’s passion were rescued from the depths of time through the universality and diachronicity of empathy. In the Museum of Monuments, the historical personalities transcended the ravages of time in all their humanity. Focusing on sentiment and empathy as a crucial medium for the experience of history left the museum’s audience with a large part of the responsibility for the extraction/construction of meaning. The Museum of Monuments was not simply a didactic institution, but relied instead on active participation for its completion. This was enhanced by the nature of the exhibits and the display as a whole, which addressed their audience largely through allegory and the half-concealed language of monuments, demanding that the visitors themselves complete those sentences through their own memories and imagination. Furthermore, the museum’s experience was one of selfdiscovery as much as empathy, implying and implicating the visitor in the various layers of its representation and meaning. The truths waiting to be discovered in the museum – pride in shared national identity, sublime aversion for the early ages of one’s own nation, universality of feeling, the frivolity or importance of stylistic preferences, or the equality of all men in the face of death – were affirmed through reflection by the people who experienced them with archetypal origins at one end of the museum and primordial nature at the other, and with pairings between the communal and personal, 111

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the emotive and rational, the particular and universal playing off each other in between, the tale which tentatively emerged from the Museum of Monuments was more myth than history. Dominique Poulot has already recognised the affinity of the Museum of Monuments with those eighteenth-century projects that revived the interest in mythology as a legitimate mode of enquiry, such as Dupuis’ Origine de tous les Cultes, mentioned earlier in this chapter.70 With Jean Starobinski, Poulot suggests that the great redistribution of the sacred and the profane in the context of the Enlightenment ended up turning back on its tracks with the rehabilitation of myth, which it had previously dismissed as superfluous and misleading.71 However, it has yet to be recognised that the Museum of Monuments went beyond such largely analytical accounts aiming to decipher myth, avoiding many of the self-defeating traps such approaches entailed. Lenoir’s museum did not merely (re-)present myth, but it attempted to participate in and continue the mythical process by weaving its own hybrid narratives (most of them already stemming from myth) back into the body of mythical discourse – a dialectic process of invention more akin to the making of myth, or mythopoesis. The preoccupation with a modern mythopoesis was inevitable in the context of a culture attempting to translate its entire metaphysics into purely scientific terms. The philosopher Leszek Kolakowski writes that myth is precisely this need that generates answers to questions of an ultimately metaphysical nature, which cannot be converted to scientific terms.72 The concern behind modern mythopoesis could be seen, therefore, as refusal to accept the illusion of self-reference for our contingent and impermanent world, the need to submit the experiential world to a permanent order, and the desire for a universal legitimacy of values. Modern mythology could be understood as the attempt to establish a dialectics of memory with ‘anticipatory leaps into the future’, in the context of a fully self-conscious culture.73 Perhaps the most important question that the association of myth and modernity raises is the very possibility of such a pairing. Kolakowski himself asks: ‘Is a consciousness possible which acknowledges the genealogy of myth and at the same time is capable of participating in it?’74 In relation to the Museum of Monuments, the first step towards answering this question is to accept that, by the eighteenth century, myth and the mythical were fully overcome. Myth, understood properly as the living backbone of culture, belonged to a traditional cosmology that had already ceased to operate several centuries earlier, in the gradual paradigm shift towards rationalisation and dominance of a scientific understanding of the world. The philosophy of the Enlightenment consolidated the process of the illegitimisation of myth, pitching it against the apparently unlimited freedom afforded by the rule of Reason and dismissing it as tyrannical superstition. The backlash against this nihilistic tabula rasa was an attempt to reconnect the present with precedent. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that, in this context, ‘the world of myth, unreflective life not yet analysed away by consciousness, the idea of a “society close to nature”, the world of Christian chivalry – all these acquire a romantic magic, even a priority over truth’.75 This Romantic corrective to the Enlightenment, however, was firmly based on Enlightenment principles, generating the paradoxical quest of 112

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authenticity through human invention, the conscious return to the unconscious, and the rational recognition of the superiority of the symbolic age of myth. Gadamer concludes: All criticism of the Enlightenment now proceeds via this romantic mirror image of the Enlightenment. Belief in the perfectibility of reason suddenly changes into the perfection of the ‘mythical’ consciousness and finds itself reflected in a paradisiacal primal state before the ‘fall’ of thought. In fact the presupposition of a mysterious darkness in which there was a mythical collective consciousness that preceded all thought is just as dogmatic and abstract as that of a state of perfect enlightenment or absolute knowledge.76

In short, borrowing the expression from historian Mircea Eliade, the rediscovery of, and attempted reintegration with, myth was necessarily ‘artificial, because decreed’.77 The great narrative that Lenoir’s contemporaries attempted to construct was the flip side of the coin of historicism and the invention of history: a mythical realm beyond history, to legitimise and carry the former. Such a narrative, necessarily confined within the framework of the modern historical paradigm, was ultimately a history with metaphysical aspirations – once more, an essentially paradoxical concept. Read as part of such a systematic archaeology of myth, the Museum of Monuments would remain a lesser project, merely derivative of such works as those of Dupuis and de Gébelin. But a number of the museum’s features would be contradictory with this view, such as the obsession with human detail or the extent of the investment on spectacle and theatricality, including the inventiveness of Lenoir’s own fabriques; or, seen from the opposite view, the meticulous pursuit of chronological progression and the attempt to fit everything in a causal temporal scheme, only to be abandoned in the introductory hall and the garden. Even Poulot interprets the two attitudes, roughly summarised as rationalising and romantic, as conflicting.78 In short, the hybrid nature of this project has continued to evade a unified interpretation. It is possible, however, to read all aspects of the Museum of Monuments as a meaningful whole, and therefore significant not just in a tolerant co-existence, but in a unique collaboration. It was precisely the combined presence of all those conflicting features, including Lenoir’s idiosyncrasies and shortcomings, which allowed the project to resonate harmoniously in its totality. Being neither a scientific treatise on myth nor a full reconstruction of mythical narratives, the Museum of Monuments arguably operated as a ‘work on myth’.79 Through this expression, and in response to the dominant view of modernity as fundamentally incompatible with the authenticity of myth, philosopher Hans Blumenberg offers an interpretation that allows for the conscious – that is, modern – participation in myth. He suggests that throughout our recorded tradition, our engagement with the mythical has always been self-conscious, simultaneously a ‘commenting on’ and a continuation and ‘handing down’ of myth.80 As such, there is no fundamental incompatibility between the logos of and the active participation in myth, between mythology and mythopoesis. Blumenberg, in his long discussion of this important idea, remains in the realm of the written word and, specifically, the re-working of ancient myths by seminal modern writers. As such, the possibility of creating work 113

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on myth, as opposed to merely mythology, in the broader realm of modern culture remains implied and tentative, and its criteria largely unexplored. Nevertheless, we can infer from Blumenberg’s exposition a fundamental characteristic of the work on myth, which is of particular significance to the discussion of the Museum of Monuments: the necessary openness of the endeavour, and its refusal or inability to sustain the illusion of a fixed and complete perspective, requiring, instead, repeated participation (‘working’) for the revelation of meaning. This is where the ‘work on’ myth comes very close to the ‘work of ’ art, both understood as a dialectic process of re-enactment and poesis, or imitation and creation.81 The Museum of Monuments was an imaginative assemblage of ideas and trends of its time, such as the quest for objectivity and causality, the fascination with genius and the cult of personality, the re-evaluation of the role of art and architecture, the rediscovery of origins, and so on, all tentatively guiding the quest for national identity and transcendental meaning in the historical dimension of human existence. Between the shifting temporalities of the teleology of progress, the eternity of great men, the finitude of mortal existence and the transcendence of sentiment, the museum did not represent a singular account of history, nor did it offer a conclusive message. The fragments of the collection – the monuments – and the ideological ‘fragments’ which Lenoir had availed himself of in structuring the project were all woven together in an open composition that did not present a definitive version of anything, but rather relied on the visitors’ participation in order to piece itself gradually, as an ongoing metaphor. As such, the Museum of Monuments can be read as a poetic endeavour and a possibility of engagement with the mythical dimension rather than a simple narrative construction, transcending its historicist basis by allowing the quest for order to be transformed into a work on myth. The ideas of play, metaphor and the poetic fragment from the context of philosophical hermeneutics can further elucidate this interpretation of Lenoir’s project. Gadamer proposes the notion of play as fundamental to the understanding of the work of art. One of the key features of Gadamer’s ‘play’ is that it cannot exist independently of the participants. It is an entity that cannot be completed, but is always in the process of becoming, while enacted. Thinking of art and the mode of engaging with it as play is Gadamer’s way of demonstrating the work’s fundamental openness and incompleteness, awaiting one’s participation to become ‘complete’. Because the participant completes what it is, the work-as-play reveals itself as a process that takes place ‘in-between’. It is a process of structuring meaning, rather than a message in itself. At the same time, and for all its openness, play cannot exist without a set of givens, an agreement and common ground, which accompanies it throughout and allows it to be recognised for what it is. In that sense, play is a fundamentally dialectic experience, relying simultaneously on the typical and the unique, the familiar and the unfamiliar, for the exploration of the world in novel and inexhaustible ways.82 Complementing this idea of play is Paul Ricœur’s reading of ‘metaphor’. Ricœur sees it as a semantic innovation and ‘an emergence of meaning’, which is crucially a function of the sentence as a whole rather than the attribute of individual elements – only an ensemble can be metaphoric.83 Metaphor is, therefore, something that has 114

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to do with the in-between, with the relationships and tensions between elements. Through these tensions, language is ‘shattered and increased’ as established meaning is expanded, ultimately increasing our sense of reality.84 Ricœur also points out, after Monroe Beardsley, that ‘the privileged procedure of metaphor is self-contradiction. The function of metaphor is to make sense with nonsense, to transform a self-contradictory statement into a significant self-contradiction’.85 Metaphor, in other words, consists in confusing the established logical boundaries for the sake of detecting new similarities that previous categorisation prevented us from noticing. As with the notion of play, however, the necessary presupposition for this operation is its grounding in language – that is, situating the innovation within the recognisable structures of context. Like play, metaphor mediates between the given and the possible, the expressed and the unexpressed, the perceived and the imagined. Imagination, a key element in the whole process, is ‘the place of nascent meanings and categories’, but also a place inextricably bound with memory.86 The complementarity of memory and imagination for our engagement with the world has been long established, but Ricœur asserts that it is in the play of metaphor where the movement between memory and imagination is at its most creative. Ricœur also emphasises the role of feeling in this context, writing that the operations of imagination and feeling are intrinsically linked. Ultimately, he concludes that the combined role of memory, imagination and emotion in the engagement with metaphor does not operate as a substitute for a lack of informative content, but is an essential requirement for the revelation of its full cognitive intent.87 A particular manifestation of this reading of metaphor, which is of the greatest significance to the Museum of Monuments, is the idea of the poetic or restorative fragment. Although fragmentation is usually associated with isolation and disruption of meaning, it is possible to access the memory of the original situation, which resides latent in the fragment, through a process of poetic reconstruction. Both ‘reconstruction’ and ‘access’ are emphatically not used here in their scientific sense of the recovery of an objective datum. Instead, what is restored is the communicative potential of the piece as part of a greater whole, which nevertheless remains absent. This reference upon which the meaning of the fragment depends is accessed through a process of analogy rather than causality, and, as such, the recovered meaning is conditioned as much by the process of its recovery as it is by its origins. The capacity of the fragment to refer beyond itself, and thus to overcome its isolation, is metaphoric and dialectic; the ‘whole’ that it refers back to cannot be understood in the sense of completion. Metaphor speaks of what remains absent, writes Karsten Harries,88 so the potential recovery implied by the fragment remains precisely that: latent and inconclusive, albeit perpetually active, as a process of becoming. Restorative order emerges through fragmentation as more than just an archaeological operation, but rather as a poetic project – as much about recovery as about creation. Much like the tension between mythology and the active work on myth, the fragment’s oscillation between alienation and restoration is largely dependent on a network of relationships pertaining to the fragment’s situation.89 The fragment can only be interpreted as restorative through the play of metaphor – that is, through its transportation beyond the current state of ruinous autonomy into a realm of meaning. As the possibility of a creative metaphor resides in the in-between of elements and 115

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their relationship with the whole, so does the restorative potential of the fragment: it is a matter of context. The poetic fragment has a particularly significant role to play in the realm of history, where the vastness and elusiveness of the ‘whole’ to be recovered is complemented by the fact that it is also constantly in the process of developing. Resonating with Aristotle’s assertion that only poetry has the capacity to represent the past in universal terms, as history just deals with the particulars, Paul Ricœur brings the notions of metaphor and the poetic fragment to bear upon the problem of history. He states that the only way to write history is through the recognition and empowerment of the ‘trace’, or fragment, as ‘standing-for’. In the absence of the eternal presence of the present of the traditional paradigm and against a history entirely conditioned by the prevailing prospect of the future, metaphor is the only medium through which the reality of the historical past can be rendered. It is only in Analogy understood as the dialectic between Same and Different, between Re-Enactment and Distance, concludes Ricœur, that history can make sense: The past is indeed what is to be re-enacted in the mode of the identical. But is so only to the extent that it is also what is absent from all our constructions. The analogue, precisely, holds within it the force of re-enactment and of distancing, to the extent that being as is both being and non-being.90

In this light, the understanding of the Museum of Monuments as a poetic project becomes clearer. The project at the Petits-Augustins was, essentially, a museum of fragments. The fact that Lenoir worked assiduously to restore them from their often ruinous state did not affect this. They were still fragments, still parts of a greater whole – whether architectural, socio-political, or metaphysical – in any case, of a whole that was largely lost. The Museum of Monuments managed to establish a latent communicative, metaphoric space between the fragments where a whole world of possible associations, transformations and interpretations became manifest. Like Ricœurian traces, the fragments in the Petits-Augustins became historically relevant and meaningful through analogy and metaphor. Through its open and enthusiastic investment in theatrics, fabriques and the integration of exhibits and exhibition operating alongside the pursuit of objectivity, the Museum of Monuments fused fact and fiction into one great scheme, challenging its own authority – ultimately raising questions about the very nature and possibility of representation. Truth was not presented as a given in this project, but was sought out between the layers of representation, pieced together from shifting threads of meaning. The museum needed the active participation of the spectator as a ‘player’ for its completion, for the imaginary and imaginative restoration of the fragments, and the emotional tracing of the traces. Paraphrasing Gadamer, it could be said that the visitors of the Museum of Monuments were the ones who secured its identity by concretising the ‘truths’ it aimed to articulate through their participation.91 Returning to Kolakowski’s earlier question about whether critical awareness of and active participation in myth can co-exist, a tentative response in relation to Lenoir’s museum would be that they can. While drawing from the various analytic projects of mythology of its time – to which Lenoir also contributed with writings – the museum also managed to transcend 116

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the limitations of such an approach. By remaining irreducible to a single narrative and implying that the process of meaning-formation since time immemorial was still active in the present day through symbolic representation, the museum opened up the possibility of mythopoesis alongside its historicist gestures. The Museum of Monuments was a multi-layered response to the drastic changes in worldview, accelerated by the Revolution and consolidated through the backlash to both Revolution and Enlightenment. Although not an exclusively personal project, it relied mostly on the input of one man, and had throughout its life a sufficiently ambiguous agenda to allow it to experiment with different processes of representation and modes of engagement with the public. The uncertain policies towards art, religion and the idea of the past of the various regimes, combined with personal interpretations of key officials, resulted in fairly erratic guidance, both material and ideological, reaching the museum throughout its life. This was a project simply not big or important enough to sustain the kind of attention the Louvre, for example, continuously had. Because it operated on tenuous ground, being incomplete and contested, the narrative it presented was, in the end, not a narrative at all in the normative sense, but a palimpsestic, open-ended affair, more like a poem. Having gathered a great wealth of fragments – of monuments, ideas, emotions – and then resisting, or even fortuitously failing to complete the picture, Lenoir managed to set up a metaphoric communicative space which offered the possibility of a restorative engagement with those fragments. Operating on a terrain interspersed with considerable restrictions and uncertainties, but also with a continuous sense of acute topicality, Lenoir proceeded to weave his metaphoric tapestry in a variety of patterns, albeit with a single purpose: mapping reality across the landscape of history, and representing its underlying, metaphysical order. It was almost as if Lenoir was constructing a vast work of art, an expansive fabrique which would engage with the great questions and quests of his time. Notes 1 Dominique Poulot, ‘Naissance du monument historique’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, XXXII (1985), pp. 418–50. 2 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1985), p. 142. 3 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 4 Ibid., p. 137. 5 Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, IL, 1959), p. 68. 6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (London, 1989), p. 534. 7 In his Essai sur le Muséum, and then repeated in Musée, year VI, p. 52. 8 See, among others, Description, year VI, pp. 4–5, and Musée, year VI, p. 52, where Lenoir repeated his well-known premise that his meticulous reconstruction of the chronology of the arts – a principle of

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 arrangement ordered by nature itself – would please and instruct artists and public alike, not only in the progress of the arts themselves, but also in the broader history of the nation. 9 The word in French is patrimoine, which translates as ‘patrimony’ in English, yet ‘heritage’ in its contemporary use, is much closer to the concept at stake, hence its preference here. 10 A famous early work was Abbot Terasson’s Sethos, vie tirée des monuments de l’ancienne Égypte (1731). In 1749, Count de Caylus presented the influential ‘De l’architecture ancienne’ at the Académie, which was not published until 1756, much revised; see also his Receueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, greques et romaines (Paris, 1752–67). 11 Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 76. 12 Antoine Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, considéré dans don génie allegorique et dans les allégories auxquelles-conduisit ce génie (Paris, 1773–85), vol. I, p. 72. 13 Charles Dupuis, L’origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle (Paris, year IV/1795), vol. I, p. 1. 14 Description, year X, pp. 43–4. 15 Ibid., pp. 50–51 and 60. 16 Ibid., pp. 53–7. 17 Ibid., pp. 81–2. 18 Ibid., pp. 87–90. 19 Ibid., p. 142. 20 Ibid., no. 99. 21 Description, year VIII, p. 195. 22 See the account in Lenoir, Compte rendu sur l’état actuel du Musée des monuments français (year VIII), pp. 4–5. 23 Lenoir, Parallèle des ancients monuments mexicaines avec ceux de l’Egypte, de l’Inde et du reste de l’ancien monde (Paris, 1834). 24 Poulot argues that Dupuis wrote his seminal work in collaboration with Abbot Leblond, one of the protectors of young Lenoir; see Dominique Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine 1789–1815 (Paris, 1997), p. 325, note 3. 25 See Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-century Europe (Oxford, 1991), pp. 50–51. 26 Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 73. 27 James Stevens Curl, Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: Architecture, Symbols and Influences (London, 2011), p. 306. 28 Lenoir, La Franche-Maçonnerie rendue à sa véritable origine (Paris, 1814), p. ii. 29 Ibid., pp. 230–31. 30 Ibid., and Musée (1810), p. 115. 31 Lenoir, La Franche-Maçonnerie, pp. 5–6.

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in search of order 32 Per Palme, ‘Ut Architectura Poesis’, in Ake Bengtsson (ed.), Idea and Form: Studies in the History of Art (Stockholm, 1959), pp. 85–107. 33 See Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ , 1987), p. 141. 34 See John C. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA, 1996). 35 Dominique Poulot, ‘Naissance du monument historique’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, XXXII (1985), p. 436. 36 Musée (1810), p. 6. 37 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la legislation (Paris, 1804), vol. I, p. 115. 38 Poulot, ‘Naissance’, p. 437. 39 See Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 82–90, and Dominique Poulot, Le public, l’état et l’artiste. Essai sur la politique du musée en France des Lumières à la Révolution, EUI Working Paper HEC 92/19 (Florence, 1992). 40 Mona Ozouf, ‘Le Panthéon: L’École normale des morts’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoir, I: La République (Paris, 1984). 41 Kineret S. Jaffe, ‘The Concept of Genius: Its Changing Role in Eighteenth-century French Aesthetics’, in Peter Kivy (ed.), Essays on the History of Aesthetics, Library of the History of Ideas V (Rochester, NY, 1992), pp. 224–44. 42 Lenoir, Description, year X, p. 100. 43 Ibid, p. 132. 44 Ibid, p. 169. 45 Ibid, pp. 170–71. 46 Ibid, p. 181. 47 Ibid, p. 203. 48 Ibid, pp. 229–35. 49 Ibid., pp. 102–4. 50 Ibid., p. 10. 51 Ibid., p. 12. 52 Ibid., pp. 338–56. 53 For example, A slight sketch of Paris by a visitor (London, 1814), p. 27. 54 Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir. Son journal et le Musée des Monuments Français (Paris, 1878–87), vol. I, p. clxviii. 55 The garden was widely theorised in the second half of the eighteenth century. Several manuals and commentaries on gardens were available, and Lenoir would have been familiar with most of them, especially the influential Claude-Henri Watelet, Essai sur les jardins (Paris, 1774), and Jean-Marie

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 Morel, Théorie des jardins (Paris, 1776). Lenoir was to collaborate with Morel on Josephine’s park at Malmaison. 56 John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London, 2004), pp. 121–2 57 S. Price and E. Kearne (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion (Oxford, 2004). 58 Elizabeth MacArthur, ‘The Tomb in the Garden in Late Eighteenth-century France’, Dalhousie French Studies, 29 (1994), p. 110. 59 Musée, vol. 5 (1806), pp. 171–204. 60 Ibid, pp. 171–95. 61 Ibid, pp. 190–91. Lenoir does not mention a specific painting, but seems to refer generally to Poussin’s œuvre. 62 Musée, vol. 5 (1806), pp. 191–2. 63 Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir, vol. I, p. clxviii. 64 All quotes from Condorcet’s text, as reproduced in Lenoir, Musée, 5 (1806), pp. 192–3. 65 Musée, 5 (1806), pp. 203–4. 66 Description, year X, p. 16. 67 Roland Recht, ‘L’Elysée d’Alexandre Lenoir: nature, art et histoire’, Revue germanique internationale, 7 (1997), pp. 47–57; drawing from the seminal study of Philippe Ariès, L’homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977). 68 Eric Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-century Studies, 37/1 (2003), pp. 23–45. 69 See Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, trans. Mark Roudebush, Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7–25. 70 Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine, p. 334. 71 Jean Starobinski, ‘Le myth au XVIIIe siècle, Critique, 366 (1977), pp. 975–97. 72 Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth, trans. A. Czerniawski (Chicago, IL, 1989), p. 2. 73 Ibid., p. 5. 74 Ibid., p. 118. 75 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (London, 1989), p. 273. 76 Ibid., p. 274. 77 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, trans. W.R. Trask (London, 1989), p. 153. 78 Poulot, Musée, p. 334. 79 See Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. R.M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA, 1985). 80 Ibid., p. xiii. 81 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Art and Imitation’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. N. Walker (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 92–104.

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in search of order 82 Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 101–10; Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art As Play, Symbol, and Festival’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful, pp. 1–56. 83 Paul Ricœur, ‘Creativity in Language’, in Erwin Strauss (ed.), Language and Language Disturbances (Pittsburgh, PA, 1974), pp. 49–50. 84 Ibid., p. 71. 85 Ibid., p. 63. 86 Ibid., p. 67. 87 Paul Ricœur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling’, in Sheldon Sacks (ed.), On Metaphor (Chicago, IL, 1978), pp. 151–7. 88 Karsten Harries, ‘Metaphor and Transcendence’, in Sacks, On Metaphor, p. 82. 89 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp. 318–52. 90 Paul Ricœur, The Reality of the Historical Past, The Acquinas Lecture 1984 (Milwaukee, WI, 1984), p. 36. 91 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 140; Gadamer, ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’, p. 28.

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4 Opposition

Against a Museum of Monuments Despite the widespread popularity and considerable praise of Lenoir’s museum, a handful of scholars and connoisseurs disapproved of it strongly. Their opposition was founded primarily on the moral and aesthetic issues involved in the uprooting of monuments from their original contexts. At the same time, such elements as Lenoir’s imaginative approach to conservation and his investment in theatricality and atmosphere more than in any rigorous archaeological principles also added to their arguments against the project. A number of notables subscribed to this view, from France and abroad. Sir Archibald Alison, Scottish art historian, and the English bibliographer Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, for example, conceded that the Museum of Monuments performed a useful role in so far as it preserved those works, as well as displaying an artful and interesting principle of arrangement, yet they believed that the works really needed to be in their original sites to be fully appreciated. Alison went as far as saying that ‘the deep and peculiar interest which belonged to the monuments of the dead in their original situation’ was ‘wholly lost’ in the museum.1 With similar arguments centring on the alienating nature of the Petits-Augustins and the necessity for those monuments to be returned to their places of origin, a scholarly opposition against the museum was in evidence from the end of the Revolutionary regime. The emphasis of those arguments was on the religious nature of the monuments, which was seen as only temporarily interrupted during the Revolution and its aftermath, and now urgently requiring restitution. The great Romantic writer François-René de Chateaubriand wrote in his Génie du Christianisme (‘Genius of Christianity’, 1802) that the monuments in the Petits-Augustins were deprived of their harmony with Christian worship, unable to speak to the imagination or the heart of their observers in their current state.2 This view was echoed closely by a small but significant number of prominent figures, such as Minister Champagny, who had supported Lenoir’s acquisitions five years earlier, but in 1811 argued that those pieces should now be returned to the ‘natural harmony’ of their religious contexts.3 But it was the sculptor Louis-Pierre Deseine and the respected scholar Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy who were the most 123

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tenacious critics of the Museum of Monuments, their criticism effectively amounting to a campaign for the closure of the project. Deseine had been involved with the Museum of Monuments on a few occasions, showing a rather conflicting stance. As the representative of two Parisian churches, he wrote to the Committee of Public Instruction in 1797, requesting the restitution of certain sculptures.4 On the other hand, around the same time, he accepted Lenoir’s commission for the busts of Héloïse and Abélard.5 Any possibility of reading this commission as a reconciliation with the curator and his project is cancelled by Deseine’s subsequent stance, five years later. In 1802, he became employed by the parish of Notre Dame, with the task of tracing and recovering those monuments removed from the cathedral during the Revolution, and acquiring replacement pieces for those destroyed. Deseine embraced this task with great zeal, going well beyond the call of his specific duty to the cathedral, with the orchestration of a wider attack on Revolutionary appropriation of monuments. In the Lettre sur la sculpture destinée à orner les temples consacrés au culte catholique, et particulièrement sur les tombeaux (‘Letter on the sculpture destined to ornament temples consecrated to the Catholic cult, and particularly tombs’) of the same year, he argued for the need to return all displaced monuments to their places of origin. In 1803, the text was incorporated in a larger work, the Opinion sur les Musées, oú se trouvent retenus tous les objets d’art, qui sont la propriété des temples consacrés à la religion catholique (‘Opinion on museums, where are kept all the works of art that are the property of churches dedicated to the Catholic religion’). In this later publication, the emphasis shifted from an argument for restitution on the basis of religious worship to an outright attack against museums. Despite the generalist title, within the text itself Deseine referred almost exclusively to the Museum of Monuments, examining it at length and opposing it in every detail. The Opinion started with Deseine pointing out the continuing inconsistency in the current government’s policy regarding monuments, referring to conflicting orders which had allowed Lenoir to acquire pieces for his museum that were initially destined for return to their original sites. Deseine wrote that by pleading the cause of the Catholic Church, he was also pleading that of the arts, which owed to Christianity their flourishing in France.6 These works, he continued, were unambiguously objects of worship, whose sacrality was temporarily suspended during the Revolution, when they were hoarded in depots. This might have been necessary for their protection at the time, but was completely unjustified now. And he concluded that, remaining outside their appropriate religious context, the monuments in the Petits-Augustins were rendered ‘useless’: ‘It is only on the same site where a monument was erected that it can be beautiful and useful.’7 Deseine’s insistence on ‘usefulness’, which permeated the Opinion, and his identification of their beauty with their sacrality are significant. The notion of usefulness was central to Enlightenment thought, warmly appropriated by Revolutionary rhetoric. In many ways, it was synonymous with the rational, and thus the moral and the good. The encyclopaedist D’Alembert suggested that, in order to have a properly enlightened, philosophical history, it would only be necessary to compose an extract of those ‘truly useful historical facts’, a statement perfectly exemplifying this attitude.8 Dominique Poulot suggests that the Revolution’s investment in the museum, 124

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with the Louvre as the most notable example, was largely a result of the Enlightenment preoccupation with usefulness. He writes that the demand for museums was less about the significant gesture of allowing public access to ‘masterpieces’ previously reserved for the exclusive use of royalty, and more a reinvention of what ‘use’ was in the first place. Not serving any edifying purpose, as they would for the people, but merely there for symbolic reasons of confirmation of status quo and continuity of rule, the artworks were understood to be ‘useless’, which constituted an offence against reason.9 The relationship between utility and Enlightenment reason was intrinsic, with both taking the role of the promised alternative to the condemned hierarchies, beliefs and practices of the Ancien Régime during the Revolution. Therefore, it seems paradoxical to find the notion equally embraced by Deseine in order to use it against the museum. This apparent contradiction continues, with Deseine writing that the monuments ought to be preserved as sacred objects, which, nevertheless, ‘belong wholly to history, to the mores and politics of the different ages of the nation10 and need to be encompassed by profound respect’.11 Whilst these objects, then, were essentially sacred, belonging to the continuity of Catholic Christian worship, they should also be respected as objects of history, irrespective of their symbolic significance. Later in the same publication, Deseine also wrote that only in situ ‘can the faithful historian engage with the monument and interrogate the causes that produced it; it is only there that the monument can communicate to posterity what the arts and the spirit of its time were really like’.12 What is clear, therefore, is that Deseine’s notion of the sacred was able to coexist happily with their ‘enlightened’ significance as historic monuments. His claims that those artefacts belonged to the Catholic faith and its sites – and, therefore, should not remain in a museum – did not mean that the new historical relevance the museum had bestowed on them was incompatible with their sacrality. On the contrary, their part in a historicist agenda was taken for granted, joined to their role as objects of worship. The reason why they needed restitution to their original sites was because their full ‘usefulness’, which incorporated their historical value, could only be effected when in context, in their original positions as sacred objects. The aim of re-sacralisation was only a step in the ultimate goal of re-utilisation of the monuments, of their rendering useful in the communication of meaning, which included first and foremost history. In this light, Deseine’s thesis appears much less traditionalist than at first and, crucially, less fundamentally opposed to the purpose of the museum. The conflict between the direct opposites of a religious/sacred and historical/secular function was resolved with the evident subservience of the former to the latter. The monuments were not themselves sacred any more, simply in the position of sacred objects. The possibility that they might still be worshipped as sacred was largely irrelevant in Deseine’s argument, which focused on the importance of placing everything ‘in context’ for the sake of clarity of historically situated meaning, rather than anything resembling ritual or transcendental purposes. In this light, the real paradox is that Deseine does not allow for such a ‘context’ to be equally, if not better, presented in a purpose-built environment – that is, in a museum. Deseine was quick to exclude the Louvre from his criticism of museums. His argument held true for architecture and ornamental sculpture, not for painting and statues deemed as high art. The Louvre, argued Deseine, was the only museum not 125

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resulting from Revolutionary vandalism, and so was properly useful, as its collections were there to educate young artists through exposure to artistic masterpieces. The autonomous legitimacy of high art was unquestionable, even for such a critic of museums. It seemed irrelevant to Deseine’s critique that, for example, a considerable number of those masterpieces were altarpieces. Their aesthetic character and value had already overshadowed their situated character as objects of worship well before the Revolution – so they were free from the constraints ruling the aesthetically inadequate works at the Petits-Augustins. The rest of the Opinion presented a detailed critique of the Museum of Monuments, confirming the double standards in Deseine’s position regarding musealisation. Deseine analysed each space of the museum, including the garden and Lenoir’s catalogue, in order to dismiss its possible relevance for the education of artists through the display of artistic progress and decline – one of the arguments Lenoir had been promoting to support his project. There was a long list of specific observations supporting this, such as: the bad light in the room containing the tomb of François I (the former chapel, off the introductory hall); the co-existence of insignificant monuments and those of illustrious personages in the introductory hall; the incongruous presence of sculptures representing animals and mythological deities amidst a majority of Christian funerary monuments in the Elysium, the ‘arbitrariness and sheer ugliness’ of Lenoir’s fabriques; the lack of space for proper observation of the monuments, and the overall ‘incompleteness’ of the collection. He took particular issue with the seventeenth-century hall, exclaiming that a tiny room such as this, with eight ‘proper’ monuments and a few more statues and reliefs, could not possibly suffice ‘for leaving to posterity an adequate idea of the marvels of this century’.13 He also resented the absence of the never-executed eighteenth-century hall, using it to emphasise the incompletion of the much-advertised chronology. Deseine concluded that this museum was badly and haphazardly assembled, lacking any proper system, and was therefore thoroughly ‘useless’ for educational purposes. By this stage of the critique, the opening argument of the essential sacredness of the monuments and their inability to be useful in any other context appeared to be forgotten. The collection’s historical aspirations were suddenly fully accepted and, in fact, the project was criticised for not articulating them rigorously enough. The interesting result of this shift was that the Opinion thus essentially ceased to argue for the dissolution of the museum, but became a critique – admittedly severe – of its specific attributes. In other words, it no longer presented a fundamental opposition to the concept of a museum of French monuments, but rather a particular disagreement with Lenoir’s handling of such a project. The personal attack on Lenoir was intensified towards the end of the paper. Deseine was particularly offended by the interpretation of the ‘progress and decline of French art’ offered by Lenoir in the catalogue. Lenoir’s position that the rule of Louis XIV was a period of decadence and decline was dismissed as idiotic and stuck in the time when ‘it sufficed to vomit insults against kings in order to be judged a patriot par excellence’.14 Furthermore, confirming the perpetual grudge of the artistic establishment against Lenoir, Deseine wrote that it wasn’t for a man who was neither an artist nor an architect to suggest that someone like Le Brun wasted his talent by his servitude to the monarch, 126

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any more than to judge the likes of Perrault, Mansard and Blondel as bad architects. Deseine concluded on Lenoir by calling him no less than sick in the head for his outrageous claims.15 It is clear, therefore, that Deseine’s argument was deployed on the level of art history rather than religion. Towards the end of the detailed critique of the Museum of Monuments and before the final attack on Lenoir’s historiographical methods, Deseine made a nominal return to the subject. What he wrote was that the continued existence of the ‘depot’ of the Petits-Augustins would be a public sanctioning of vandalism in the face of all established ideas and respect for religion, and called for the restitution of all those monuments ‘serving the history of Catholic faith and its principles’. He then identified the country’s great churches as ‘sacred museums’, wherein the public had the double advantage of ‘admiring the veritable genius of the arts and learning the history of religion’.16 In other words, in this brief return to religion, there was not a word about worship proper – instead, the goal was once more identified as the communication of the history of religion, alongside the genius of the arts. There is no reason for denying Deseine the possibility of a genuinely religious motivation and the desire to serve his client for this enterprise (the Church) as convincingly as possible. Nevertheless, it is clear that the main thrust of the critique and its language was that of art connoisseurship and historical scholarship. Whether this was a calculated move by Deseine to rally the support of scholars such as Quatremère for the religious front, by borrowing their arguments, or whether he genuinely did not perceive the inconsistency between an art-historical and religious stance is, ultimately, irrelevant. The necessity to address those works as historically relevant, and for their historical relevance to exist over and above any religious function, was definitive confirmation of the fundamental shift in their cultural role and the ensuing need for a reconsideration of their placement. Although Deseine seemingly argued for a return to an older order, with religion reinstated in its dominant role over the arts, he himself had already accepted in all but name the secularisation and historicisation of art. What allowed for the survival of the nostalgic appeal to a Christian unifying order were the disturbing implications of this shift, which challenged the relevance of artworks and threatened with alienation and meaninglessness. In any case, Deseine’s cry against musealisation was largely post factum. The very way in which he conducted his criticism indicated that the shift was already irreversible and, therefore, a different kind of discourse would now be necessary: not to question the raison d’être, but to develop the character of the new phenomenon of the museum. Quatremère de Quincy and the Rapport of Year VIII Quatremère de Quincy was by far the most eloquent and intellectually substantial opponent of the Museum of Monuments, and personally instrumental in its closure. His sustained and acute criticism encompassed all other arguments against Lenoir’s project, and he thus embodied the quintessential opposition to it. By the time of his involvement with the Museum of Monuments, he was already a highly respected scholar 127

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of art and architecture. His first contribution to the academic world was made in 1785, with the winning essay for the Prix Caylus, on Egypt and the origins of civilisation. He went on to compose the highly influential dictionary of architecture for Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie méthodique (from 1788 onwards), the Considérations sur les arts du dessin en France (‘Considerations on the arts of design in France’) with its two Suites in 1791, as well as a number of shorter texts in the form of reports and discourses on a variety of cultural matters for the Revolutionary authorities before 1793. Quatremère supported the movement for a constitution, so for the first three years he was fully engaged with the Revolution as a member of various committees. It was during that period, in 1791, that he embarked on his first and only architectural commission, the transformation of Souflot’s Sainte-Geneviève into the Pantheon. This project was never completed, as Quatremère’s career was abruptly interrupted by the Revolution’s change of direction in 1793. His views were now deemed counterrevolutionary and, after a spell in prison in 1794, he was forced into hiding until 1797, when he finally left the country, seeking refuge in Germany. Despite the extreme tenuousness of his position, in 1796 he published the seminal Lettres sur le préjudice qu’occasionnens aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monumens de l’art de l’Italie (‘Letters on the prejudice in the arts and science that leads to the displacement of the monuments of the art of Italy’), subsequently known as Lettres à Miranda (‘Letters to Miranda’), signing them ‘A.Q.’ He was recalled from exile with the amnesty of the 18 brumaire (November 1799), and within a few months began his campaign against the Museum of Monuments. As Sylvia Lavin puts it, until his death in 1849, the number and prestige of Quatremère’s official positions and honours bestowed on him were equal only to those of his publications on the arts.17 Quatremère’s appointment as Perpetual Secretary of the Academy in 1816 and his immediate recommendation for the closure of the Petits-Augustins were the culmination of a six-year campaign against the project, which officially commenced in August of 1800 with his first report to the General Council, of which he was a member. Entitled Rapport fait au Conseil Général (Departement de la Seine), le 15 thermidor an VIII, sur l’instruction publique; le rétablissement des Bourses; le scandale des inhumations actuelles; l’érection de cimetières; la restitution des tombeaux, mausolées, etc. (‘Report made to the General Council (Department of the Seine), on 15 thermidor year VIII, on public instruction; the re-establishment of Exchanges; the scandal of current inhumations; the building of cemeteries; the restitution of tombs, mausolea, etc.’), it explicitly attacked the Museum of Monuments for being nothing but a relic of the Revolution that ought to be closed immediately.18 As suggested in the title, the broader aim of the report was to challenge certain of aspects of cultural policy and education left over by the Revolutionary regimes, including schools and funds for education, public burials and cemeteries, and the body of monuments and other objects removed from their churches to be placed in depots. Although in this last part of the report Quatremère often talked about ‘establishments’ in the plural, it was quite obvious from further details that he specifically meant the Museum of Monuments. Even when referring directly to it, Quatremère did not call it a museum, but merely a depot, like Deseine was to also do in his later Opinion. Quatremère wrote: 128

opposition I want to talk about this heap of pious objects that once decorated temples but now stand stricken in this extravagantly wasteful store, where a multitude of works of art that constituted treasures of this city when in their original sites, are now amassed. I want to talk of this mock conservatory where fragments of temples are hoarded daily, of the depot of the Petits-Augustins, veritable cemetery of the arts, where a throng of objects are made useless for study, meaningless outside their proper contexts, forming the most ludicrous, if it wasn’t the most indecent, of collections.19

In this light, the Museum of Monuments was an arbitrary body of works, lacking any sense of structure and, thus, purpose. This condition was detrimental to the significance of the monuments, since they could not serve to educate artists individually – as high art masterpieces could, regardless of context – but needed an appropriate situation to make sense. The pieces in the Petits-Augustins had no value except that conferred upon them by their broader sites and as a result of a collective appreciation with their complements (ornaments and so on). A double offence was, therefore, perpetrated by Lenoir’s museum: the alienation of the pieces themselves and the impoverishment of their original sites, both aesthetically and spiritually. Previewing Deseine’s argument of a couple of years later, Quatremère recognised that the stripping of religious establishments during the worst years of the Revolution, violent an act though it was, was necessary for their preservation; but, by the same token, once the danger was over, the works ought to have been returned to their sites, their traditional role fully restored. At the same time, and despite the delegation of those monuments to a second-rate artistic category, Quatremère also showed concern for their art-historical relevance and how that also suffered by their displacement. Quatremère found additional angles to support his condemnation of this displacement. Although he seemed oblivious to it, this was problematic, as the divergence of reasons why monuments were diminished cancelled each other out, undermining his position. Further on in the report, he asked whether this unnecessary prolonging of the separation of monuments from their churches wasn’t ultimately an attack on ‘the freedom of religions and their worship’, in the face of the removal of its symbols.20 Suddenly, it would seem, the problem was no longer one of Christian dogma and the idea of ‘sacrilege’, but instead of a civic nature, where the freedom of worship of any cult was the right of the individual, and any hindrance of this worship – such as the ‘imprisonment’ of its ritual artefacts – was an attack on the citizens’ liberty. Quatremère proceeded to offer a further argument in a similarly Voltairian vein: the treatment of tombs and funerary monuments in the Petits-Augustins, he wrote, denied individual life (and death) the required level of respect and civility. The problem was rife in society as a whole, with state burials and public cemeteries ‘abandoned to the elements and chance’, preventing citizens from being interred ‘honourably and according to their religion’. The continuing separation of private funerary monuments from their families was part of this disgraceful state of affairs, which Quatremère saw as a mockery of the commemorated individuals’ virtue. And, he hastened to add, any lesson for the future such monuments could provide would only emerge by appreciating them from within ‘the dignified context of the family’. What constituted appropriate ‘context’ for these artefacts, therefore, as well as what their essential meaning was, could vary considerably 129

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depending on one’s point of view; it just couldn’t be a museum, and certainly not Lenoir’s. Although the artefacts in the Petits-Augustins were evidently not high art, their artistic qualities, especially as linked to the ‘progress and decline’ of styles, were sufficiently significant to be considered in the Rapport. Having concluded with his religious and socio-political arguments, Quatremère went on to matters of the cultivation of the arts. Referring to the much-advertised aim of the Consulate – the new government since 1799 – to develop the arts, he wrote that ‘the genius of the arts can finally soar to those heights where liberty has been calling it’. But, in order for that to happen, this genius had to be ‘fed by morality’. For it was only morality that gave even the most ancient of works their brilliance, still shining all those centuries later. This moral core was founded on the ‘sacred rites and religious beliefs’ of their time. ‘What a strange contradiction, then,’ exclaimed Quatremère, ‘to aim for the same effect [the perfection of the arts] while rejecting its very causes!’ It was the Revolution that had ‘the privilege of this contradiction’, he continued, with its projects of so-called conservation, which ended up more disastrous than vandalism itself. The perpetuation of those ‘depots of ignorance and barbarism’ robbed the works of all their value and glory, finally rendering them ‘like signs of a lost language’. For what were these monuments if not ‘the characters of a symbolic language’?21 In this latter comment, we can clearly read Quatremère’s subscription to contemporary theories of visual language and the notion of the ‘speaking monument’, also greatly influential on Lenoir and his project. Quatremère made an extensive and enduring contribution to these theories through his own writings on architecture, which were largely responsible for his enduring relevance as a scholar, alongside his founding contribution to museum discourse. The monuments in the Petits-Augustins, therefore, were as inherently part of a greater order as the alphabet was to language, according to Quatremère. And although this order was nominally presented as religion, it becomes increasingly clear by the line of argument in the Rapport that it was in fact an amalgamation of emerging aesthetic theories: What sad destiny awaits the arts, if their products are no longer bound to the needs of society; if so-called philosophical systems shut them out of all access from imagination, deprive them from the uses that religious beliefs prepared them for, from the sweet affections of the soul […]. Yes, you have transported their matter; but have you been able to transport the cortège of tender, profound, melancholy, sublime and touching sensations that surrounded them? Have you been able to transport the interest that they drew from their sites, the religious atmosphere that enveloped them, this sacred aura that was their livery? Have you been able to transfer into your stores the ensemble of ideas and relationships that sprinkled over the works of the chisel and the paintbrush the charm of illusion, correcting their defects, veiling their shortcomings, and enhancing their beauty?22

What is described in this passage is not a partaking of religion in any traditional sense. There is nothing here to suggest the Church as the human community in communion with the divine, with the works of symbolic representation as necessary mediators between them. The emphasis is wholly on the works as triggers of sentiments and the ensuing response of the individual, ultimately for their own sake. Any religious or vaguely transcendental aim is hinted at in the most abstract and distanced way. This is 130

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a modern abstraction of spirituality, with any sense of participation in specific rites and beliefs dissolving into a modern concept of the universality of feelings. The loss of that moral character that Quatremère lamented in the musealised monuments translated mostly as a loss of sensationist and emotional impact. The ideal relationship between audience and monuments that Quatremère presented in the Rapport was an aesthetic experience, investing in the sublimity of art and its powers of transcendence through the appeal to imagination and sentiment, very much in keeping with the contemporary sensationist theories that underpinned Lenoir’s project, as we already saw. Earlier in the text, Quatremère had asked: since religion was still alive, how could it possibly be justified to treat its signs as those of a dead and forgotten language? Yet it is quite apparent that for him, too, religion was forgotten. What he described in its name was much closer to the Romantic cult of art of a Goethe, or the idea of a spiritual education through the arts of a Schiller. At the point where a church was presented as the appropriate place for the display of religious monuments because only there was an overall ‘charm of illusion’ successfully maintained, so the artistic shortcomings of works could be overlooked, one does wonder if perhaps Quatremère was not, after all, referring to the Museum of Monuments without quite being aware of it. What Lenoir was trying to do in his museum – with the employment of theatricality and atmosphere, and the heavy involvement of sentiment and imagination – was no less an investment in the charm and unifying powers of illusion than what Quatremère longingly described in his report. Quatremère shared with other critics the most salient points against the Museum of Monuments, but he was unique in placing this specific critique in the context of a much broader discourse on art. Those of his writings referring to Lenoir’s project directly or implicitly were only a small part of a large opus addressing the fundamental problem of the work of art and its relation to place. Situating Quatremère’s critique of Lenoir’s museum in this greater body of work will demonstrate in greater detail that the Museum of Monuments was a significant attempt to respond to those very concerns that preoccupied Quatremère, despite the scholar’s interpretation leading him to actually condemn it. Quatremère de Quincy on Art The most complete articulation of Quatremère de Quincy’s ideas on the role of art in society and its incompatibility with the institution of the museum, as he saw it, was the Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art (‘Moral considerations on the destination of works of art’), written in 1806 but only published in 1815. The Rapport of year VIII, discussed above, was similar in vein, but concerned specifically those Ancien Régime monuments that were transported during the Revolution into depots such as the Petits-Augustins, which bore the brunt of the critique as a contested ‘museum’. The Considérations, on the other hand, was a work of both greater volume and greater intellectual import, as it addressed all types of artworks, in an attempt to offer a complete thesis on the issue of their preservation and display. Nevertheless, it is this 131

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text that also articulated the most complete theoretical background for the collective opposition to the Museum of Monuments, by situating the specific attack on it in a bigger picture. Significantly, the sections referring to ‘such depots pretending to be conservatories of art’, as Lenoir’s project was called here, were direct transcripts from the aforementioned Rapport. The main aim of the Considerations, wrote Quatremère, was ‘to show that the moral utility of the works of art’ was the most important of all necessary conditions for the work’s success, both in terms of its production and its consumption. If the beauties of imitation were to be successfully captured by the artist, it was essential that the work he was creating be destined for a specific and noble employment. Furthermore, this employment was equally essential for the work to be appreciable by the amateur and enjoyable to the public. In other words, the work of art could not fulfil its purpose in the greater context of culture if it was at any point detached from the specificity of a situation – in the deepest sense. This essential condition of ‘belonging’, which the work had to fulfil, was identified by Quatremère as tantamount with the morality of art. Quatremère meant for the Considérations to be a normative work, a guide to help forging closer relationships between ‘the needs, tastes and enjoyment of society’ with works of art. 23 However, in the end, it read more like a critique and condemnation of current practices than a creative proposal. This in itself is substantial indication of the difficulty of Quatremère’s position, caught between overwhelming changes in culture and a traditionally situated – even nostalgic – sensibility. From such a position, it was possible to analyse the problem quite astutely, as he did, but nearly impossible to overcome it. The main premise of this work concerning the museum – that it was basically incompatible with the morality of art – was developed along the lines of four key themes: nature as the source and measure of the moral; sentiment and the soul as the means for apprehending the moral; the continuity of history as the only meaningful ‘location’ for the work of art; and the transcendence of the human condition as the fundamental purpose of art. Natural law, wrote Quatremère, also governed cultural development. It linked the progress and decline of the arts to their purpose in society – a relationship not unlike that between indigenous plants and their natural environment: the deeper plants (or arts) were situated in their natural (or cultural) context, the more they thrived. Attitudes towards the arts getting in the way of their appropriate ‘use’ and moral purpose were thus fundamentally ‘unnatural’, against the essential character of art as the imitation of nature.24 In this view, the museum represented one of the most unnatural attitudes towards art, that of self-reference. Quatremère referred to the ‘amassing’ of works in ‘cabinets and museums’ as a strange system, a mania and an abuse, because, the alienation of existing works aside, it encouraged the production of new ones with no other purpose but to furnish such collections – a practice against the essence of artistic creation. Works made exclusively for collections had no political, religious or moral significance, and could, thus, only be addressed superficially, on the level of pedantic connoisseurship and the formalism of brushstrokes or colour. This tendency was overwhelming, and already subordinating older art to the self-referential principle, at the expense of its 132

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moral purpose. ‘The abuse from museums’, he wrote, ‘and the abuse from this kind of critique were born together.’25 The second theme of the Considérations pertaining to the museum identified emotional experience as the necessary and natural means for engaging with art. It was nature’s way of linking the useful with the agreeable and pleasant, so pedantry and calculated reasoning were a hindrance to a proper relationship with art. The technical or ‘scientific’ aspect of the work was the requirement of a certain competence, both in its production and appreciation, but, in itself, did not amount to much. It was through sentiment that the link with morality was effected, in the workings of the artist’s genius and in the experience of the spectator. The spirit of criticism and the museum were impotent when addressing the arts, because they relied on reason in order to engage with something that appealed predominantly to the soul. Intriguingly, in order to further support this argument, Quatremère recruited the academic concept of je ne sais quoi (‘I know not what’), writing that ‘this je ne sais quoi, which is often everything for the sentiment, is never anything for reasoning’.26 Those works that appealed most to sentiment and imagination were the ones most diminished when displaced, as outside their proper locations they could no longer engage the soul. Only within the continuity of a unified experience, through a wealth of relationships and correspondences, could the work of art reveal its significance to the spectator. This unity was both spatial and temporal, assisting the works to achieve their goal, which was the ultimate transcendence of their specificity and materiality, and their transformation into sentiment. In the museum, however, this unity was disrupted. In this alienated state, focused on scientific curiosity and criticism, the works could no longer produce the sentimental illusion and seduction that would have allowed them to penetrate the spectator’s soul.27 The temporal dimension of the necessary unity of art, in practice indistinguishable from the spatial, was the third theme in Quatremère’s critique of the museum in the Considérations. He wrote that: the arts are the historians of the people, bringing together a great number of facts, opinions and traditions that compose the ethical core of nations. The influence of monuments on the spirit, on memory and understanding arises less from their possible perfection as art and more from their antiquity, the authenticity of their use and their availability. These primordial books, always accessible to public inquiry, carry their significance openly, and communicate it unreservedly and effortlessly to the sentiment of those who consult them.28

The introduction of the historical dimension and its direct association with the highest purpose of art is significant. The central concept of moral utility was here expanded to include the communication of national character, which was made available to the public through the ‘authenticity’ of the works. This idea of authenticity was less related to the scientific-archaeological quest for material objectivity rapidly taking over the study of the past in the nineteenth century, and more related to the continuity of their unbroken link to origins and purpose. The continuity of history established a kind of community between the present and the great personalities of the past, rendering them, momentarily, contemporaries and, enduringly, compatriots. For this, the attempt to efface the imprint of time from monuments by restoring them to a state of fake integrity 133

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erased the best part of their beauty and value, and, crucially, ‘this inviolability which defended them from the attacks of the spirit of criticism’. Ultimately, the antiquity of the works was ‘a kind of natural right’, which demanded to be respected.29 In the same way that authenticity was not really about archaeology, history was not about chronological accuracy as factual narrative, but instead a philosophical history, where the moral message was all. This message, however, unlike the philosophical history of the Enlighteners, was one addressed primarily to the soul, apprehended through sentiment and imagination, rather than reason and intellect. Thus, although Quatremère had argued for the necessity of a continuing purpose and meaning for the work of art if it was to retain its historical character, he also did not hesitate to condemn the museum for ‘killing art to make history’. This was because such an institution, through the alienation of artwork from context, achieved only a semblance of history, a mere epitaph. In a characteristic turn of phrase, he accused ‘those depots, absurdly named conservatories’ – a thin disguise for the Petits-Augustins – for using the excuse of history to dispatch the monuments to oblivion.30 The fourth theme of Quatremère’s discourse, to which the previous three were leading, was the identification of the moral dimension of art as a medium of transcending the human condition and accessing a higher order of reality. The original and inalienable purpose of art was to communicate with our soul, and thus to stir us towards the moral and the transcendental. It was the degree to which it achieved this goal that gave art its measure of success. In order to emphasise this, Quatremère embarked on a description of his experience at the shrine of St Rosalia of Palermo – the young princess who renounced the world and devoted herself to God in a mountain hermitage. The actual bronze and alabaster statue of Rosalia, wrote Quatremère, was rather mediocre and forgettable, but the impressions it produced were remarkable and enduring. This was exclusively due to the placement of the piece in the original grotto-like hermitage of the princess, surrounded by appropriate paraphernalia such as the saint’s bed, the whole setting making for such an evocative experience that visitors could barely hold back their tears as they knelt by the effigy to pray.31 As evident elsewhere in Quatremère’s work, despite his apparent Catholic piousness, it was not the exclusive privilege of Christianity to produce such emotions and links to the transcendental. Whether St Rosalia or the ‘sensual religion’ of Classical Greece, what gives life to works of art, he argued, has always been the need to lift humanity to a grander destination and ‘a beauty more than human’.32 In a manner reminiscent of the liberal tone of the Rapport of year VIII, what Quatremère was trying to convey here was that art was destined to serve a higher purpose, across cultures and centuries, above and beyond the specificity of cult and worship. Although Quatremère had positioned himself within the Christian Catholic framework, the validity of his argument was not actually dependent upon that point of view. His interpretation of art was not even tied to the concept of religion as such, but rather to a more abstract and universal concept of a higher, spiritually accessible order which humanity had a natural and inalienable urge to commune with. Although in Quatremère’s discourse religion initially appeared as the raison d’être for art, ultimately, both religion and art were treated as media through which the primordial urge for transcendence manifested itself. 134

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Quatremère’s position on cultivation and self-improvement through the arts, leading to a higher level of human existence, demands to be compared to the movement of Bildung of his German contemporaries, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, key in the development of the first public museum in Berlin and appreciative visitor of Lenoir’s project, as discussed earlier. Ironically, however, where Quatremère appeared to differ was precisely on the role of the museum in this scheme. For the French scholar, the higher purpose of art was incompatible with its musealisation. The appeal to our emotions was muted by the work’s displacement, which resulted in no less than a ‘dedeification’, a loss of primary function, and total estrangement from the circumstances that rendered the work meaningful in the first place.33 This reduction suffered by the displaced works was a sweeping, destructive transformation, which not only affected the explicitly religious pieces, but all art. Quatremère used this significant expression to denote the loss of meaning in general – where sarcophagi lay devoid of affection for the dead, coats of armour devoid of honour, signs devoid of significance. Like gods without an altar, he wrote – or, rather, like altars without gods – the displaced works became objects of a sterile admiration and lost the power to move us. Towards the end of his text, it is interesting to find Quatremère turning the tables once more and stating that it would be wrong to place all responsibility of ‘speaking’ on the work itself.34 A fundamental reciprocity existed between the work and the soul, but the latter could not receive the appropriate impressions from the work unprepared. This preparation came, primarily, from the ‘multitude of connections that escape analysis’ conveyed through context and the ‘moral resonance’ established through it. One would assume, therefore, that precisely because this web of relationships eluded analysis and representation, it could not be substituted: one had to experience the works firsthand, in situ, otherwise one remained closed off to the proper moral experience of art. There was, however, an exception: that of the true connoisseurs who, presumably, were so deeply versed in and engaged with art that they could immediately connect with the work regardless of context – the latter being readily supplied by their highly informed imagination. This exception is a resonant compromise to the seemingly sine qua non importance of context in Quatremère’s thought. If the proper experience of art could actually be recreated independent of it, within an imagination primed by a considerable body of knowledge, then it is conceivable that such specialist knowledge could be used in order to create an altogether new context that would, through a variety of means, highlight this crucial web of relationships in order to appropriately prepare the imagination of the nonspecialist for the experience of art. If the knowledge of the expert sufficed to provide the missing context of that experience for the expert himself, it would follow that a similar provision could be made for the wider public through the use of that knowledge – for example, in the intelligently constructed setting of a museum, perhaps also followed by an appropriately enriching catalogue which would appeal to the imagination of the spectators in such ways that would, potentially, allow for their full, uncompromised engagement. The Considérations contained a further, more explicit challenge to its author’s opposition to the museum. Although the work, as stated by Quatremère at the beginning, was meant to address all art, in the attempt to compose an overarching thesis for such 135

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works, whether Classical masterpieces or lesser artefacts, halfway through the text one came across the following disclaimer: It is not that I intend to deny collections of Classical Art any kind of utility […]. What I am opposing is the abusive excess of collections and their misconceived role today. Let us inaugurate galleries with those works that serve for instruction, in which the public, like the student, will be able to form their taste and their talent. Let us, in the end, set up cabinets for the display of Classical works of Art, but let us not intend all works of Art to become nothing but cabinet objects.35

Despite Quatremère’s acerbic attacks on the pedantic spirit of critique pervading collections with the sole purpose of instruction, and his statement that the education of the true artist ought to involve the heart and soul, which could not happen when the works were alienated from their place and purpose, he ultimately conceded that at least some such collections were useful. Which was, of course, inevitable, because what of those Renaissance paintings and Roman sculptures that had been languishing in collections across Europe for close to a millennium? What of the Louvre? Quatremère was neither naive nor absurd, so the apparently wholesale dismissal of ‘cabinets, collections and museums’ was clearly more a strategy for achieving his specific goal than a definitive philosophical stance. It would certainly not have helped the campaign against the Petits-Augustins to elaborate at any length about how museums could, in fact, play a positive role in the new cultural order, even with stipulations about the difference between Classical art and French monuments. Because this distinction must have felt increasingly tenuous even to its author, in the context of a cultural establishment which, a mere decade later, transported the majority of monuments from the newly closed Petits-Augustins into the new gallery for ‘modern’ sculpture in the Louvre. Quatremère’s earlier Lettres à Miranda, published in 1796, shows that his acceptance of the museum’s inevitability was not an exception, but a well-documented thesis. This was a series of seven letters written to Quatremère’s friend, General Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan revolutionary who briefly joined the French Revolution, only to oppose it after its excesses of 1794. The letters, encouraged by their recipient, were an opportunity for Quatremère to criticise the despoliation of Rome’s artistic treasures by the victorious French Revolutionary army, under the guidance of Napoleon. On his way to arguing against their displacement, Quatremère sketched a broader discourse on the meaning of art in society and its relation to context, which in many ways was a preamble to the Considérations, a decade later. There were, however, considerable intellectual differences between the two texts, which contributed to the significant ambiguity and irresolution of Quatremère’s thesis concerning the museum. As with the Considérations, the main premise of the letters to Miranda was the vital relationship between art and its original setting, which did not allow for works to be moved without loss of coherence and significance. Nature was once again identified as the great legitimising order governing the realm of art – in this case, having designated Rome as the cradle of artistic perfection after the Greeks. As such, the stripping of Rome of its riches would be a mortal blow to the unity of its fabric and its ability to communicate its significance. The theme of unity was as central to these letters as it was to the Considérations, with the presence of one significant, if fleeting, identification 136

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of this unity as a ‘metaphysical harmony’, bonding works of art with their original situation.36 However, unlike the later text, in the letters to Miranda, the removal from context was apparently secondary to the primary cause of concern, which was the resulting dispersal of the works. Quatremère discussed at length the damage that would result from the breaking up of certain ‘units’ of artworks – such as schools of painting or groups of sculpture – and made it clear that this would be even more destructive than the removal from their original locations. If such groups were to be transported as a whole, their displacement could be mitigated. There is abundant evidence of this position throughout the text. In the fifth letter, for example, Quatremère wrote that England had the second largest concentration of antiquities outside Rome, but it was dispersed among numerous private collections, so it was very difficult to gain access to the antiquities and impossible to appreciate them comparatively, as anything other than individual fragments. At no point was their presence in a foreign country questioned here.37 The issue of comparison appeared to be crucial for the proper appreciation of, and instruction from, the works of art in question. There were many instances in these letters where the ability to make comparisons and draw parallels between works was emphasised as a necessity in its own right. For example, being able to see minor works in the presence of masterpieces was deemed necessary in order to reveal the brilliance of the latter, which otherwise would be less evident.38 What becomes clear throughout these letters is that the concept of the museum was taken for granted. To begin with, the unity of Rome’s ancient riches was consistently referred to as the ‘museum of Rome’. This was, of course, a manner of speech not unusual at the time, yet a highly significant one in this context, for it freed the term from any a priori negative connotations, which was definitely not the case with the Considérations. If the naturally situated, harmoniously united antiquities in Rome were a museum, then it should not be impossible to conceive of another museum, where works of art could exist equally harmoniously. In fact, this possibility was already established in the title, which positioned itself against that displacement of monuments from Italy, the dismemberment of its schools and the despoliation of its ‘collections, galleries, museums, etc.’ (my emphasis). Here one was immediately led to understand that the actual museums of Rome were appropriate locations for antiquities that had to be respected. Finally, as Quatremère concluded his introductory observations, he exclaimed that before even thinking about the antiquities of Rome, France should make the most of its own, by organising digs and putting the worthy pieces on display in existing museums, or even in purposely erected ones: Why not restore the beautiful amphitheatre of Nîmes and turn it into a depot for all the ancient riches of this Roman colony? Why not establish a museum of antiquities on a par with those of Italy? This, it seems to me, is the appropriate thing to do, before considering the dismemberment and despoliation of the galleries of Rome itself.39

Despite initial appearances, therefore, Quatremère was not against the museum as such. Another series of letters, written to the sculptor Antonio Canova in June 1818, and subsequently also published, apparently turned the tables on his earlier work by presenting nothing less than an elaborate praise of the museum institution. The subject of these letters, as stated by Quatremère, was the Parthenon marbles at the British 137

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Museum, examined primarily in order to establish whether they might have been direct products of the legendary Phidias’ chisel, or merely of his workshop.40 This being the case, it is not entirely surprising that the ensuing discourse was conducted almost exclusively on a level of connoisseurship. What makes this text interesting for our discussion, however, is that all the questions concerning the removal of artworks for the museum, which Quatremère had previously raised in his writings, were also pertinent here, but the scholar’s position on them appeared much changed. He identified the Parthenon fragments as ‘architectural sculpture’, which was, by definition, inferior to antique statuary, as the latter, he argued, was created for a different and nobler purpose. This meant that the more autonomous the works of art, the more acceptable they were in the scale of artistic perfection. Quatremère struggled with the problem of autonomous and relative beauty and how each could be measured, in order to form the unified comparative scale of the entire artistic production of Antiquity.41 What is significant here is not that Quatremère acknowledged the difference in situation and value between architectural ornaments and autonomous statues, but rather that he felt the need to translate the value of the former in a manner compatible with the latter, so that the fragments could be compared with the statues in one consistent scale. In other words, Quatremère attempted a transformation of the ornaments into works of art that could stand on their own, in order to be appreciated on the same grounds as the acknowledged aesthetic masterpieces of Classical statuary. The autonomy of the fragment in the museum was defended as follows: As part of a complete building, each object of sculpture loses its grandeur; fixed in its place and in the company of a multitude of equivalent pieces, an object can only be seen from one angle, as part of an ensemble […]. All details, workmanship and sense of scale, disappear. Here [in the museum], instead, one can touch each object individually, perceive it in its real dimensions, see it from all angles, observe its most minute aspects and compare and contrast it with ease […].42

As the culmination of a consistently pro-museal stance, Quatremère concluded his final letter to Canova by paying the British Museum the highest compliment, writing that its splendid collection of original sculptures from the ‘most beautiful temples of Greece’ placed it ‘at the forefront of all the collections’, where ‘science and history of art will come looking for Classical models and the most authentic materials for the cultivation of good taste’.43 Even though Quatremère offered a sweeping disclaimer for his discussion of the Parthenon pieces exclusively on the level of connoisseurship – because he was here merely concerned with questions of their authorship – he could not altogether avoid the key issue concerning their initial removal, and his unreserved support for their musealisation. The publication of the letters to Canova in the same volume with the letters to Miranda – at the author’s own request, in 1835 – made it necessary for him to justify his defence of the despoliation of Athens, when he so strongly opposed the one of Rome. Quatremère wrote in the volume’s preface that the reason for this pairing was one of contrast rather than comparison, as beyond the obvious similarity of the events discussed (the removal of indigenous works of art from their respective countries, Italy and Greece, and their transfer to foreign museums, Louvre and British Museum), there 138

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were no further similarities between the two cases. In fact, the two incidents differed significantly on several grounds, all of which amounted to the same thing: the different regimes in the two countries in question. Quatremère deemed that there was no ethical problem with the removal of the Athenian marbles, simply because the government of the country – the Ottoman Empire, at the time – had given permission for their removal, whilst not so with the Romans, though the fact that the occupying French in Rome were exactly what the Ottomans were in Athens was apparently lost on Quatremère.44 The author continued that the regime in Italy encouraged and assisted scholars and amateurs in their visits to Rome, but not so the Ottomans to Athens. Furthermore, the Parthenon marbles were under direct peril of total destruction should they have remained in their place, as opposed to the properly conserved ones of Rome. Finally, concluded Quatremère, the sculptures removed from the Parthenon ‘were situated too far from view and too disadvantageously [on the building] to allow travellers to study them properly or even appreciate them fully’.45 It appears, therefore, that, as far as the Parthenon marbles were concerned, the fundamental issues of context and unity, central to the argument of the letters to Miranda and the Considérations morales, despite the differences those works already display, were entirely absent in the letters to Canova. It is particularly striking to note that, in the fourth letter to Miranda, Quatremère had referred to the Parthenon and another incident of sculptures being removed from it, in this case by the Venetian General Morosini, in order to illustrate how mindless and destructive such acts were. ‘I ask you,’ he wrote, ‘what those two fragments [the sculptures transported to Venice] could possibly mean detached from their composition and their context?’46 We are once more confronted with a conflict in Quatremère’s ideas on the role of art in society, and the museum in particular. Before proceeding with an interpretation of this ambivalent position and the implications for Lenoir’s museum, a brief mention should be made to a fifth text by Quatremère, the earliest of all examined here, published in three instalments in 1791. The Considérations sur les arts du dessin en France suivie d’un plan d’académie, ou école publique (‘Considerations on the arts of design in France, followed by the plan of an academy, or public school’) argued for the need of the new, enlightened regime to encourage the arts of design and proposed ways in which this could happen. This work appeared in the context of the early Revolutionary debate on the arts and the anticipation of a new artistic renaissance for the regenerated France. One of the key moments in the three instalments composing the Considérations sur les arts was the proposal for an institute along the lines of the ancient archetype of Alexandria, as perceived at the time, where the sciences, letters and arts would be brought together and studied in unison. The first instalment proposed an academy for the study of all the arts, featuring a museum of original antique statues, a gallery of casts and moulds of Classical statuary, and a collection of ornaments and architectural features.47 By the third instalment, this academy had become a ‘universal lyceum’ and a ‘national institute’ that also encompassed the study of sciences alongside the arts. This would be housed in the Louvre itself, which was ‘the most magnificent of all the buildings in France’, and therefore the most appropriate for such a resonant project.48 Arguably, the idea for such an institution, despite its conception in a Revolutionary context within which 139

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Quatremère was never at ease, remained with him throughout his life, and its totalising, unifying aspirations lay behind the majority of his projects from then on. Quatremère de Quincy Rethought It has become apparent that Quatremère’s position on the museum was more complex than the outright condemnation that his attitude towards Lenoir’s project implied, and which has survived widely associated with Quatremère’s name.49 Clearly, the scholar was troubled by the radical changes in his time, where the idea of the museum in all its manifestations was becoming increasingly relevant, at the expense of a more traditional, situated understanding of art and architecture. The consistent theme of his discourse was moral utility – a concept directed against the superficialisation of the work of art. Whether its commodification by idle curiosity and the desire for luxury, or its misguided rationalisation by the spirit of criticism, Quatremère deplored the fragmentation of the work from a fundamental unity upon which relied its proper significance and value. This underlying notion of unity, in its various manifestations throughout the texts, was the basis of his entire critique of the museum. But was this notion truly contradictory to the concept of the museum, as Quatremère would have us believe? Or did the ambivalence of his pronouncements indicate that perhaps there was more potential in the institution than he allowed for? In the Rapport of year VIII, where the works in question were religious and funerary monuments, the initial identification of religion as the unifying reference shattered by the museum, gradually transformed into a much broader and stranger concept. Quatremère appeared to be concerned with something more like an abstract sense of spirituality through an aesthetic/emotive experience, rather than with religion proper. The Considérations morales allude to a universal concept of higher order with which humanity would commune through art – an idea strongly echoing the contemporary culture of Bildung across the border. Between this text and the earlier letters to Miranda, the argument linking the true significance and morality of art with the condition of ‘belonging’ was elaborated sufficiently to appear fundamental. It would seem that the work of art absolutely required this link to its original situation in order to be meaningful and purposeful. However, upon closer inspection and through a number of contradictory statements, it emerges that the truly essential precondition for the experience of art was not belonging as such, but rather the implied sense of unity – this latter being what would ultimately captivate the soul of the observer and allow for the true purpose of art to be fulfilled. Quatremère’s preoccupation with location and the related capacity of the works to be ‘true historians’ of their own past was a concern directly related to the capacity of art to perform its specific role and to affect the observer in the appropriate way. Quatremère was concerned with history because the implication of time and the invocation of continuity with the past were essential for the experience of the spectator, effecting the immediate involvement of sentiment, which, as we have seen, was the gateway to the higher, moral significance of art and the ultimate fulfilment of its purpose. An exemplary 140

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moment of this in Quatremère’s writings is found in the Considérations morales, where he argued for the historical authenticity of art in terms of the ‘veneer of time’, which gave to the works a character that would command ‘respect and veneration’ when contemplated.50 But the investment in history that Quatremère so clearly distinguished from rationalisation and the pedantic ‘spirit of critique’ placed the understanding of art on a different level from its holistic traditional role, which he was nostalgic for, and which, paradoxically, he hoped to recapture through precisely this history. The kind of experience that Quatremère associated with art – whether Roman antiquities, old master paintings or French monuments – presupposed that the works were the object of historiography, already participating in the socio-cultural continuum in different ways to those which he was rallying to preserve. The scholar’s argument that the museum was ‘killing art to make history’ failed to acknowledge the fact that those works were already ‘history’ in their original settings. With the Grand Tour having consolidated the ideal of Classical Rome into a unified picturesque image of antiquities, palaces, rolling hills and colourful locals, Quatremère’s pronouncement that ‘the country itself is the museum’ resonated with irony, despite its sincere intentions. What he intended to communicate was the inextricability of the artworks’ significance and beauty from their setting and background, but what inevitably came through was the alarming fact that the whole country had become a museum. The fact that the word ‘museum’ was used throughout in two opposite senses is a crucial detail, revealing the extent of his conflict. Being an astute observer of the changing culture and, more specifically, the shifting role of art in society throughout the past century, he must have been aware of the inevitability of museum-like phenomena, even as he was condemning the institution. The result was a discourse interspersed with disclaimers, exceptions and outright contradictions, through which the notion of the museum emerged shrouded in ambiguity. This is why, for example, he did not hesitate to include the Uffizi and other museums and galleries of Rome in the catalogue of ‘original settings’ threatened with despoliation by the French. For Quatremère, then, there was a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ manifestation of the museum, or, to borrow Maurice Blanchot’s expression, a ‘white’ and a ‘black’ image of the museum, both of which shared the same characteristics in a positive–negative relationship.51 This dual manifestation seemed to resolve the problem, allowing for disparate units such as the whole of Rome, Michelangelo’s house, various abstract ‘Classical collections’ and, to a large extent, the British Museum itself to be considered good and necessary museums, while the Revolutionary Louvre, the despoliation of Rome, the Museum of Monuments and other anonymous ‘Cabinets, Collections, and Museums’ were condemned as cemeteries of art. What appears an arbitrary division could be finally understood as one resting on the extent to which the higher sense of unity of the art on display was preserved and communicated or lost in the service of other agendas. It would follow that the kind of experience a museum offered its visitors would be of paramount importance, connected as it was to the capacity of art to communicate its ultimate significance. This experience was the crucial point where all other concerns – context, history, authenticity and so on – converged in Quatremère’s theory. This position was implicit throughout the Considérations morales, and clearly manifested in the letters to Miranda and to Canova, where the objects in question – the ‘museum’ of Rome and the 141

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Parthenon marbles – were analysed and praised predominantly in terms of the kind of experience they offered to the contemporary spectator. The remarkable conclusion was that both groupings were seen as operating satisfactorily in terms of their sense of unity and the kind of experience they were effecting, despite the fact that one was the site for which the works were originally created, whereas the other was a quintessential museum institution at the other end of Europe. Quatremère saw no conflict in praising those museums that he thought had the right attitude towards art – maintaining their totality and allusion to a unifying order, which was the fundamental precondition for meaning – while, on the other hand, condemning similar museums where such conditions were not met to his satisfaction. One cannot help but wonder whether Quatremère would have written the letters to Miranda had there been a coherent selection of Roman marbles from, say, Hadrian’s villa beautifully set up in a room of their own in the Louvre, just like the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum. The philosopher Jean-Louis Déotte has already proposed that the museum institution was actually a precondition for Quatremère’s position of art, which was predominantly based on aesthetic judgement, despite proclamations against the artwork’s autonomy. Quatremère’s critique, writes Déotte, did not raise the fundamental question of the properly ethical and ontological destination of art, and his idea of ‘moral utility’ was already an emancipated Kantian/modern concept. The invocation of the social relevance of the work was merely a tool in the quest for ‘better’ art, not the other way around. Hence the ultimate necessity of a ‘white’ version of the museum, allowing the ‘black’ to address whatever was problematic (mostly because of its relationship to the Revolution).52 However, whilst the acknowledgement that the concept of the museum was essential to Quatremère’s thesis is very significant, arguably there was more to Quatremère than mere aesthetic intent, as Déotte would have it. Quatremère’s entire oeuvre, from his dissertation on Egyptian architecture to his combined edition of writings on art in 1835, brought together theories of origins, language, art and architecture in order to identify new ways of conceptualising identity through the material culture of the past. The urgency of identifying common ground on the basis of nationality did not relent with the demise of the Revolution. Once questioned, the old order, whether political, social or metaphysical, could not be returned to. Art and architecture were in a unique position to support the construction of such an identity, and Quatremère was actually among the pioneers of this concept. Édouard Pommier writes that, for Quatremère, the monuments of Antiquity were not just models to copy for the benefit of the arts, but primary constituents of a ‘science’ indispensable to the future of civilisation. This resonates throughout his work, but is posited most emphatically at the beginning, in Quatremère’s 1791 sketch of a ‘national institute’ where everything, from astronomy and ‘the chronology of the world’ to philosophy and poetry would be integrated in the representation and interpretation of culture as a unified system.53 This institution, which incorporated collections of different kinds of artworks and artefacts, as mentioned earlier, was a kind of laboratory for the conceptualisation of a totalising context and a new, historically articulated identity for the nation. While it is clear from later post-Revolutionary work that Quatremère was deeply conservative and resented the demise of the old order – perhaps even occasionally 142

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attempting to revive it with such proposals as the complete restitution of monuments from Revolutionary depots – it can be argued that he was also aware of the inevitability of change. For this reason, he began to seek the sense of unity and integrity of culture so important to his thought through increasingly modern, historicised devices, which included the museum. Although it might sound paradoxical, in the end the quest for a universal order that he had embarked on could only occur in the realm of history. Despite his interpretative tools, Quatremère was interested in the essential and universal nature of things. His idea that art and architecture, across time and place, had a coherent system based on their essential and universal nature was the basis of what he called a ‘metaphysics’. This mode of conceptualising artistic production offered the possibility of identifying continuity and change in culture and society as a whole through a rational mechanism, while, at the same time, testifying to the presence of a greater order unifying and legitimising human artifice on a more enduring level. And such a metaphysics was also Lenoir’s overarching aim with the Museum of Monuments, although his framework was much more implicit and metaphorical, instead of normative and theoretical like Quatremère’s. Notes 1 Archibald Alison, Travels in France During the Years 1814–1815 (Edinburgh, 1816), pp. 106–9; Thomas Frognall Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (1819) (London, 1821), pp. 105–7. 2 François-René de Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme (Paris, 1978 [originally published Paris, 1802]), p. 936. 3 As discussed in Chapter 1. 4 See AN F17 1241 (5 fructidor year V). Andrew McClellan comments that the government of the Directoire was not opposed to such restitutions, provided that the Church paid for all costs; see McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenthcentury France (Cambridge, 1994), p. 194, note 133. It should be noted, however that, in practice, such moves were rare; the majority of pieces that left Lenoir’s museum in those years were bound for the Louvre. 5 See Jules-Joseph Guiffrey, ‘Bustes commandés à Michallon et Deseine’, Nouvelles archives de l’art français, 2/2 (1880–81), pp. 378–83. 6 Louis-Pierre Deseine, Opinion sur les musées […] (Paris, year XI [1803]), p. iv. 7 Ibid., p. 8. 8 From the Réflexions sur l’histoire, quoted in Dominique Poulot, ‘Naissance du monument historique’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, XXXII (1985), p. 425. 9 Dominique Poulot, Le public, l’état, et l’artiste: Essai sur la politique du musée en France des Lumières à la Révolution, EUI Working Paper in History HEC 92/13 (Florence, 1992), p. 20. 10 He actually writes ‘Empire’, this being 1802 and Napoleon an emperor. 11 Deseine, Opinion, p. v.

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 12 Ibid., p. 8. 13 Ibid., p. 30. 14 Ibid., p. 59. 15 Ibid., p. 65. 16 Ibid., pp. 44–7. 17 Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 3. 18 A.C. Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport fait au Conseil Général (Departement de la Seine), le 15 thermidor an VIII […] (Paris, year VIII). 19 Ibid., p. 33. 20 Ibid., p. 34. 21 Ibid., pp. 29–30 and 35. 22 Ibid., pp. 37–8. 23 Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art, edition including the Lettres sur l’enlèvement des ouvrages de l’art antique à Athènes et à Rome (Paris, 1989 [originally published Paris, 1836]), pp. 13–15. 24 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 25 Ibid., pp. 38–42. 26 Ibid., p. 44. 27 Ibid., p. 45. 28 Ibid., p. 47. 29 Ibid., p. 67. 30 ‘C’est tuer l’Art pour en faire l’histoire; ce n’est point en faire l’histoire, mais l’épitaphe’; ibid., p. 48. 31 Ibid., pp. 60–61. 32 Ibid., p. 63. 33 Ibid., pp. 54–5. 34 Ibid,. p. 78. 35 Ibid., p. 46. 36 Ibid., p. 114. 37 Ibid., p. 121. 38 Ibid., p. 111. The same point is made again in the sixth letter, where Quatremère wrote that the ‘extracts’ of different schools of painting, which had found their way into various collections around Europe, were insufficient examples of their kind, as a result of their isolation; ibid., p. 128. 39 Ibid., p. 203. 40 Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres écrites de Londres à Rome et addressées à M. Canova, sur les marbres d’Elgin,

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opposition ou les sculptures du temple de Minerve à Athènes, from their 1835 edition, appearing together with the letters to Canova of 1818, under the title Lettres sur l’enlèvement des ouvrages de l’art antique à Athènes et à Rome, published in a compilation volume with the Considérations morales in 1989, p. 122. 41 Ibid., p. 100. 42 Ibid., p. 122. 43 Ibid., p. 185. 44 Ibid., p. 91. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 218. 47 Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations sur les arts du dessin en France suivie d’un plan d’académie, ou d’école publique, et d’un système d’encouragemens (Paris, 1791), pp. 128–30. 48 Quatremère de Quincy, Seconde suite aux Considérations sur les arts […] (Paris, 1791), p. 47. 49 See, for example, Daniel Sherman, ‘Quatremère/Marx/Benjamin’, in Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff (eds), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London, 1994), pp. 123–43, and the influential Réné Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts 1778–1830 (Paris, 1910). 50 Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales, p. 67. 51 Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien infini (Paris, 1969), as cited in Jean-Louis Déotte, ‘Rome, the Archetypal Museum, and the Louvre, the Negation of Division’, in Susan Pearce (ed.), Art in Museums: New Research in Museum Studies, vol. 5 (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1995), p. 222. 52 Déotte, ‘Rome, the Archetypal Museum, and the Louvre, the Negation of Division’. 53 Édouard Pommier, L’art de la libérté: Doctrines et débats de la Revolution française (Paris, 1991), pp. 421–6.

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5 The Inevitability of the Museum

The analysis of the critique of the Museum of Monuments suggests that the opposition’s success in closing it down was less the result of a consistent philosophical position and more a set of specific circumstances. Revealing and influential as Quatremère’s Considérations morales was, being the pinnacle of critique against the museum, it did not offer a sufficiently robust intellectual ground for its wholesale condemnation, especially when situated within Quatremère’s greater opus on the role of art. It seems that, all said and done, it was this particular project that irked him and his allies, being, as it was, a child of the Revolution and Lenoir’s amateur endeavours, rather than the fact that it was a museum of French monuments as such. After the Revolution’s physical and metaphysical traumas, the artefacts in the Petits-Augustins could not have rested anywhere else but in a similar institution – as history confirmed – and so, under the circumstances, Lenoir’s project was simultaneously inevitable and appropriate. By trying to argue that it was an aberration via a wider philosophical position on art, Quatremère was making a futile attempt to reverse the course of history and undo the Revolution and its enduring implications. More importantly and, perhaps, ironically, it appears that this particular project was actually in tune with Quatremère’s own ideas and concerns, and it even succeeded in offering some answers. Public Cultivation Perhaps the most obvious alignment between Quatremère and Lenoir was their mutual interest in the edification of the general public, through a fairly modern concept of cultivation, available to, and increasingly necessary for, every citizen, based on the arts and their relationship to history. Although the Museum of Monuments was promoted as relevant to the education of artists, demonstrating the progress and decline of styles and showcasing different costumes and decorative ornaments from different ages, arguably its main target audience was the general public. Lenoir repeatedly claimed that the succession of the ages, which the visitor would be encouraged to observe at the Petits-Augustins, was ‘a book open to instruction’, a school and an encyclopaedia. In this, its educational character, the display was supposed to approximate the role 147

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of those ancient ‘Museums’ – a reference to the museum of Alexandria, a popular, idealised notion of a collective institution for learning and cultivation, also important for Quatremère.1 Beyond the chronological arrangement and its directly instructive character, Lenoir envisaged his project as a more broadly cultivating experience, through its commemorative and contemplative aspect. For example, we have already seen that the Elysium was proposed as a space for communicating to the visitors ‘the holy respect for the enlightenment, talent and virtue’.2 Finally, this role of the Museum of Monuments was latent in its very structure as historical representation and as a work on myth. Participation of the public was essential for the ‘completion’ of the project – that is, for the emergence of meaning and revelation of truths the project sought to establish. The story of the development of art allowed visitors to access the very order of history, alongside the smaller, more specific narratives on offer. Public education was central to Quatremère’s argument as well. In the fourth letter to Miranda, he expressed his concern about the capacity of people to get the most out of works of art should those be isolated, because they would never be able to access the contextual significance necessary for the communication of the works’ meaning. Scholars like himself, he argued, always carried the necessary tools for comparison in their mind, and could thus complete the context at will even in the most alienating of settings, whereas the common spectator remained hugely disadvantaged.3 Furthermore, the Alexandria-like establishment that he envisaged in his essay of 1791 was addressed to artists and public alike, being ‘a place of instruction for the whole of France’.4 Throughout his work, the discussion of ‘white’ museums, of which he approved, was conducted from the point of view of the public as well as the artist and scholar. The improvement of public taste was one of the goals of these establishments, but more important was the communication of the morality of art and its intrinsic link to society. We have already seen the considerable ambiguity in Quatremère’s position on the museum, which, inevitably, also implicated the white versions of the institution. One would have thought that the pursuit of the improvement of public taste would be contradictory to the premise of the Considérations morales, for example, which focused on the concept of moral utility and attacked matters of mere taste and ‘pedantic connoisseurship’. Such inconsistencies aside, the public was unquestionably at the centre of Quatremère’s understanding of art and its relevance, whether as visitors to Rome, to the British Museum or to the churches of Paris. Furthermore, both Quatremère and Lenoir were keen to distinguish ‘true’ art as the result of inspired genius from mere items of curiosity and ‘products of frivolity’, as the former put it, or of a mere craft for the satisfaction of the arrogance of despots, according to the latter.5 Aesthetic Experience Lenoir and Quatremère were also in implicit agreement about the role of sentiment and the imagination in the engagement with art, placing it above that of rationality, since the soul was the way through which art would achieve its ‘higher’ aim. Quatremère wrote at length on the primacy of sentiment, identifying it as the crucial factor for the definition 148

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of works of art, but also describing the impoverishing and alienating results from the failure of art to excite such feelings when in the ‘wrong’ place.6 Although Quatremère’s stance towards connoisseurship was ambiguous, oscillating between its condemnation as ‘cold science’ and pedantry in the Considérations morales and then embracing it in the letters to Canova, he was nevertheless consistent about the primacy of a totalising experience of art, wholly engaging the senses and the soul, which the intellect might assist, but could never substitute. Lenoir understood the concepts of accuracy and authenticity as they applied to the ‘character’ of his halls and their effect on the visitor, rather than in any strictly archaeological sense, using the rigour of chronology as a loose backbone on which a multi-layered spectacle was strung. He also invested greatly in sentiment through his catalogue texts, offering emotional descriptions of the pieces and evoking impassionedly the personalities they represented. Beyond the catalogues, the Museum of Monuments itself must have offered one of the most sentimentally charged experiences of its kind. Having established the backbone of its narrative with the use of chronology, thus engaging the visitor initially on an intellectual level, the meticulously constructed setting, combining decor and monuments in a theatrical unity, then proceeded to excite the imagination, conjuring up images and ideas from the widest literary and pictorial sources. In such a setting, the presence of an array of deeply pathetic personalities, simultaneously great in their virtues and all too human in their emotions, most of them known from folklore or fiction, demanded an empathetic and sentimental response from the visitors. In the Elysium, the decorative explosion and chronological order gave way to nature and the semantics of death, appealing to sentiment in an even more direct and sombre way. Their mutual belief in the primacy of sentiment in the experience of art led Lenoir and Quatremère to appreciate the importance of theatrical illusion and absorption. Quatremère wrote about the ‘charm of illusion’ necessary for the fruitful engagement with art, and repeatedly invoked imagination and absorption as the necessary means to stir the soul through art.All the means conducive to the seduction of illusion, experienced through the faculty of imagination, ‘envelop the spectator’, while they give to art ‘a sort of life’, he wrote, and further, that the unique virtue of the ‘beautiful works of art’ is to ‘ignite the imagination’.7 Lenoir also wrote about the importance of imagination on several occasions, where he identified it as the tacit and natural attraction that linked the subject with its object through the senses, with this effect intensified in the case of the fine arts.8 More importantly, he invested in the powers of imagination extensively throughout the museum, structuring both halls and garden like theatrical sets. The role of decoration in the creation of a unified and meaningful ambience was equally appreciated by Quatremère. More clearly than in any of his theoretical texts, we can see this in his single project as an architect. Quatremère was placed in charge of the conversion of Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève into the Revolutionary Pantheon during 1791–93, leaving before the project was completed. Because of the highly charged political climate at the time, with Quatremère’s abrupt condemnation as counterrevolutionary and subsequent flight, the Pantheon as a whole cannot be seen as representative of Quatremère’s museological position. However, there are several instances documented in his own writings on this project that clearly show 149

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his appreciation of the role of decoration and ‘atmosphere’. Drawing from theories of ‘speaking’ architecture and the symbolic language of monuments, Quatremère proposed to adorn the interior of the Pantheon exclusively with allegorical sculptural decoration. He explained his choice by pointing out that a very particular ‘character’ was required for the Pantheon of the nation’s Great Men, which was absent from the actual edifice of the former church.9 The role of decoration would be to communicate to the public ideas that were not immediately available otherwise from the building itself, and to thus assist the visitors in their understanding of the project’s meaning. The manipulation of light was also recruited for this purpose. Quatremère proposed to drastically reduce the brightness of the interior by obscuring all the lower windows of the building, explaining that this was ‘the most appropriate means for giving the space the sombreness and gravity of character that would communicate its purpose’.10 Previewing Lenoir’s ideas for the Petits-Augustins a few years later, Quatremère envisaged creating a garden for the project, which he also called Elysium. In his first report on the Pantheon, in August 1791, he suggested extensive planting to surround the building, in order to isolate it from the noise and commotion of the city. Quatremère wrote that the ‘silent shadows’ of a ‘sacred grove’ would provide occasion for ‘philosophical promenades’, instilling the suitable feelings of contemplation and veneration in the visitors of the nation’s temple of Great Men.11 Restoration In the context of the attempt to convey the meaning of art as fully as possible, both Quatremère and Lenoir subscribed to the practice of restoration. This may seem surprising on the part of Quatremère, since one of his key objections to the Museum of Monuments was Lenoir’s extensive restoration practice, supported by what seemed like an opposition to all practices that tampered with the ‘antiquity’ of the works.12 This, however, must fall under the circumstantial arguments of the scholar, since he consistently defended restoration in the rest of his work. The letters to Canova present the most systematic such defence, with Quatremère writing that, although the restoration of sculpture could be done abusively, nevertheless the glory of Antiquity would never have had the effect it did on public taste in the last half century had the works of art been left in the state of mutilation in which they were found. As long as restoration did not damage the original and did not make false additions, he continued, it was of great value as it revealed the true value of the works by restoring the ‘accidents of time’ inflicted on them.13 In principle, therefore, Quatremère was in agreement with Lenoir, who believed that it was necessary to restore the damaged monuments to their original splendour for the benefit of contemporary viewers, in order for them to properly convey the style and character of the age to which the belonged. Quatremère proposed reconstructions that he believed enhanced the experience of art in a number of ways. As Anthony Vidler has observed, Quatremère sought to establish a basis for the restoration of statues with his volume Le Jupiter Olympien (‘The Olympian Jupiter’, 1814), in which he made a number of studies for the reconstruction of the great temple 150

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and statue of Jupiter in Sicily. He later applied those principles in his projected full restoration of the Venus de Milo. Furthermore, entirely on a par with Lenoir, he engaged in the imaginary evocations of destroyed monuments from contemporary descriptions or remaining fragments, projects that he did not hesitate to call ‘restitutions’.14 Finally, in the letters to Canova, he proposed no less than an abstracted reconstruction of part of the Parthenon within the British Museum, so that the Elgin marbles could be placed in similar positions to the ones they originally had in the building and, therefore, be better appreciated as a whole, rather than as individual fragments.15 Although there was a more explicit preoccupation with archaeological accuracy in the reconstructive projects of Quatremère, in essence, they were not so different from Lenoir’s work, including the latter’s fabriques. Both men were concerned with feeling and character in art, interested in ideas of context and the state of completion of the works, not for their own sake, but as conditions for the communication of overarching meaning. Quatremère had a more systematic archaeological sense of what that state should be, whereas Lenoir, in a more artistic vein, seemed to be convinced that his fancy resulted in a richer and more meaningful composition than a faithful reconstruction would. But it is clear that both men approved of constructive interventions on art – even if in different degrees – in the name of the enhancement of the eloquence of the works. It could even be argued that, with both men explicitly subscribing to theories of speaking architecture, and Quatremère actually a major contributor to the field, the idea of an ‘improvement’ on the original piece’s symbolic density was altogether appropriate. Order in History The primacy of meaning in art and the ensuing recognition of the continuing relevance of the art of the past for contemporary culture beyond issues of taste and style was a fundamental belief shared by Lenoir and Quatremère. This was manifested repeatedly in their work, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the book analogy, which both curator and scholar used to describe the nature and significance of their subjects. In Lenoir’s ‘encyclopaedic’ collection, ‘the young would find word by word the degrees of imperfection, perfection and decadence through which the visual arts have passed’.16 This could easily have been a quote from one of Quatremère’s writings. The text analogy was implied consistently throughout the latter’s work, since the parallel between art/ architecture and language was one of his most important premises. In the third letter to Miranda, he wrote: ‘What is ancient Rome but a great book that time has destroyed and scattered its pages, and which modern research, day after day, attempts to repair and make whole again?’17 What is of additional interest here is that Quatremère used the concept of the book and the museum interchangeably to describe the indivisibility of Rome’s historical identity. The indissoluble unity that the ‘museum of Rome’ had become through the centuries was what allowed it to be meaningful and potentially legible like a book.18 Earlier, in his Prix Caylus essay, we find Quatremère’s definitive statement binding the linguistic structure of architecture with its role as social expression and public instruction. Referring to the Egyptian pyramids, he wrote: 151

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 Destined to receive on all their surfaces symbolic inscriptions and characters, we must regard them as great books always open for the instruction of the public […]. All monuments were like public libraries, labelled with their ornaments […] being literally depositories of rites, beliefs, exploits, glory and, ultimately, of a political and philosophical history of the nation.19

This description of the exemplary monument, represented by the pyramids, as books open for instruction in the history of the nation sounds like it could, in turn, have been taken out of Lenoir’s texts on his own project. The Museum of Monuments presented its fragments precisely as depositories of the history of the nation, and through it, of the order of history as a whole. Despite their fragmentation, disparity and temporal distance, through their unification in the museal experience, this history would become accessible once more for the benefit of the contemporary public. The book analogy brings us to the cornerstone of both Lenoir and Quatremère’s idea of the museum, which revolves around their understanding of history. The historical dimension of art and architecture as the essence of their continuing relevance for culture was central to the projects of both men. Quatremère’s disapproval of the PetitsAugustins was largely based on what he read as a mishandling of the monuments’ capacity to be historically ‘active’. But what Quatremère understood as historicity and what Lenoir had attempted to set forth in his museum were essentially the same: a sense of unity and coherence between representation and reality which extended across the centuries, linking the present and the future with the originary moment, through the primordial ground of nature. The essence of this order was eternal, which confirms the fundamentally ahistorical dimension in the ‘histories’ of both Lenoir and Quatremère. This transcendence of temporality related to the mythical and metaphysical planes that they both ultimately targeted well beyond mere historiography. One of Quatremère’s most famous iterations, which gave this book its title, was that the depots were ‘killing art to make history’. However, it would be misleading to interpret this statement as a categorical distinction between art and history. Quatremère did not end his sentence there, but went on to say: ‘it is not history, but rather an epitaph’.20 The real problem, therefore, was that certain establishments, according to Quatremère, simply failed to do history properly, hence killing their art. Proper engagement with history was one that alluded to continuities beyond the science of history itself. Quatremère, like Lenoir, acknowledged his debt to Winckelmann, but also identified the latter’s limitations in that respect, writing that, ‘despite being estimable, his History of Art resembles more a chronology than a history’.21 Throughout his career, Quatremère distinguished history from chronology, which was itself only one aspect of the former. He was interested in mapping the continuity of history and its existence as a unified field, wherein multi-layered relationships unfolded as a process for understanding the essence of art and architecture. Édouard Pommier goes as far as to say that, by historicising the masterpiece – that is, by making its status relative to context – Quatremère created the theoretical foundations of a new discipline, which was already being called ‘the history of art’.22 But history itself was a means to an end, part of the greater quest for order and truth. In the Considérations morales, Quatremère proposed that the situated monuments were the ‘true historians’ of the 152

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nation, since they communicated no less than its ‘moral existence’.23 He introduced his own dictionary of architecture as presenting all aspects of monuments, including the ‘metaphysical’, and he wrote that he aimed for it to be a ‘universal treatise of this art’, which he considered essential for contemporary culture.24 Despite Quatremère referring to the metaphysical aspect as one of many contributing to the total unit of knowledge he was composing, it could be argued that, through his entire work, he was constructing nothing less than a metaphysics. The extensive common interest of Quatremère and Lenoir in the origins of civilisation and the identification of unifying principles behind all cultures reinforces their approximation. To this purpose, they both wrote at length on Egypt, as well as composing comparative studies of world monuments. It is significant to note that Quatremère, like Lenoir, was also involved in Freemasonry. He was a member of the Thalie lodge, at least from 1782 to 1786. Regardless of the extent to which this association may have influenced specific art-historical interpretations,25 it cannot but strengthen the proposition that Quatremère was concerned with the greater problem of the order of reality, and was searching for ways to represent it in a secular and ‘enlightened’, yet metaphysically valid, way. Beyond – or rather through – history, both he and Lenoir sought to articulate the unifying order governing human endeavour, which would be simultaneously transcendental in its universality and secular/rational. This ultimately ahistorical principle was, nevertheless, to be reached through the necessary passage of a historical narrative and, thus, articulated in historical terms. This meeting of history and metaphysics was, of course, not exclusive to Lenoir and Quatremère, but a fundamental characteristic of the modern historical paradigm and its attempt to claim universal legitimacy. In that sense, both Lenoir and Quatremère were participating in the articulation of a new mode of understanding and representing the world, each in their own way, but through largely similar means. The Limits of Scholarship While both Quatremère and Lenoir accepted the historicity of art as highly significant for contemporary culture, and while both sought to articulate a sense of metaphysical order through its interpretation and representation, the key difference was that Lenoir believed unreservedly that this could be achieved in the museum, whereas Quatremère appeared conflicted on the matter, choosing to condemn Lenoir’s project while praising other institutions. Ultimately, however, it is clear that the scholar also believed in the possibility of an ‘elsewhere’, outside the original context of monuments, that could reenact the conditions required for them to ‘speak’. The main criterion for judging this elsewhere as appropriate or inappropriate – a ‘black’ or a ‘white’ museum – related to the structure and character of the display and its ability to evoke the unity of the context left behind temporally and geographically, which is exactly what Lenoir was trying to do: to re-integrate his fragments in a context that would allow for the necessary process of reconstruction to take place – that is, for an interpretative framework to emerge, as part of which his fragments would become significant again. Referring to the signs of 153

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the language of architecture, Quatremère wrote: ‘in order for them to say something, one must not employ them to say nothing’.26 But this is also what Lenoir was concerned about with the monuments in his project. He implied that they remained unexploited in their original contexts, employed to say nothing, as the public was no longer able to understand what they were really about – that is, their relevance to the construction of a historical paradigm and the identity of the nation. The collapse of traditional structures left these pieces mute and meaningless in the midst of their original settings. They now needed explanation and integration in a new structure in order to make sense again, to become meaningful and relevant to contemporary culture. From this point of view, it could be argued that the crime was not the removal of the monuments in the first place, as Quatremère would have it, but rather their abandonment in situ, depriving them of the essential interpretative context in which they could finally achieve their true potential. The churches were becoming like museums without the ordering principles of history, while Lenoir at the Petits-Augustins proposed the ultimate ordering scheme. The inevitable moment of modern irony in all this is that the Petits-Augustins itself was originally a convent, with its actual church space turned into the most museum-like part of the whole project, the wonderful introductory hall, where the historical paradigm was represented in a single expansive frame from the contemporary to the primeval, from enlightenment to myth. Ultimately, the difference between Lenoir and Quatremère was not their aim, but their vantage point. Quatremère was deeply suspicious of the changes in culture and society that he was witnessing around him. He particularly resented the effect on art and architecture and their alienation from the fabric of society. In the fourth letter to Miranda, he included a cri de cœur that speaks most eloquently about this: It is not in the tumult of large European cities, nor in the midst of the chaos and distraction arising out of mercantile concerns that a profound sensibility for beautiful things can be developed, this sixth sense that the contemplation and study of beauty offers to the students of the arts. It will always be necessary for those who devote themselves to such concerns to go elsewhere, so they can breathe an air free from the vapours that obscure the images of the beautiful and the true.27

For Quatremère, in the midst of this obfuscating chaos, Rome was the outstanding reminder of a clarity and unity that the modern world was deprived of. Jean-Louis Déotte writes that there is a distinct sense of the end of an era in Quatremère’s work, a disturbing rupture that does not just imply a radical change in the production and reception of art, but heralds the very end of art. As the alienating institution par excellence of a new epoch, which was as irrespective of specific regimes as it was inevitable, the museum embodied for Quatremère a ‘derealisation’, a cancellation of all that was valid and meaningful in art.28 This, however, held true for the black version of the museum alone, not for the host of white ones that Quatremère had innocently approved of throughout his work – a point which, surprisingly, Déotte does not acknowledge. Quatremère’s critique of the museum survives today as a confident condemnation, foreshadowing the museum debate of our times, when in fact Quatremère himself was never that clear. He was not against museums, but against what he saw as the ensuing loss of meaning in the majority of 154

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museums. While resenting one version of the museum as an embodiment of all that was worst in the new order of things, he also accepted another version as an essential tool in the improvement of culture. He demonised the museum as one of the means through which his ideal unity of culture was abolished, while failing to detect that this unity was itself largely museal. As Déotte points out, Quatremère failed to see that the essence of the museum was essentially retroactive: as soon as it became possible to address a collection as legitimate and meaningful in the museum, it was impossible to stop any collection from being addressed as museal, anywhere. This is, in fact, a rephrasing of Adorno’s observation that the Quatremèrian critique was somewhat quixotic in its accusation that the museum was destroying the work of art, since even those works which had remained in their original places had become museum pieces without the museum.29 Lenoir’s project, being the direct product of this museal shift, wholly embraced it as irrevocable, and even necessary, and used it as its starting point for the negotiation of the problems of fragmentation. Lenoir accepted that the default place of historic monuments was now in museums. The hope of a return to the unity of the old order by repairing its physical manifestations was nostalgic and futile. If any reinstatement were possible, it would have to occur on the level of metaphor – that is, through the complete acceptance of fragmentation on the level of the everyday. Quatremère, on the other hand, was both too nostalgic and literal, thinking too much like an antiquarian. Perhaps his exclusively theoretical engagement with the issues gave him a misleading view of the problem. He described the fragmented core of culture so meticulously that it seemed possible to recapture its unity through a simple reversal of the alienating process. Lenoir, probably because of his scholarly shortcomings, operating as an enthusiast and an amateur lacking the material and intellectual means to pursue the ideal unity literally, attempted instead to compensate for fragmentation and incompleteness in more imaginative and poetic ways. Both Quatremère and Lenoir participated in their own way in the great inventive project of history of their times. They had come to understand the emerging importance of the historical dimension of art and its relevance to culture, as well as the ensuing necessity for an ahistorical root and backbone for history that would legitimise it beyond human fallibility and mortality. Hence, they were both involved with myth and metaphysics. But Quatremère’s efforts remained in the realm of mythology, as can be seen from his various studies and comparative analyses. Despite his passionate quest for a structure that could align the increasingly uncertain future with an idealised past, the future remained as chaotic and terrifying as before, as mythology failed to provide the necessary continuities for harnessing novelty into some kind of comprehensibility. But in the Museum of Monuments, in a much lower-key way, the possibility of continuity emerged implicitly, with the various interlaced threads of the represented histories revealing the perpetual structuring of myth as a process, alive and ‘working’, as the visitors engaged with the project. In that sense, the Museum of Monuments was a fundamentally celebratory project. In the multi-layered and incomplete scheme of the Petits-Augustins, history was not confronted as a ‘great inventive project’ after all, but rather as a tentative, metaphoric and playful engagement. Instead of attempting to capture it and understand it head-on 155

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as a clear and distinct narrative with an inevitable beginning and, of course, an end, the Museum of Monuments represented it as a realm of multiple and often contradicting possibilities emerging and expiring at every turn. As such, history failed to appear as a terrifying linear procession, whose definitely causal yet still unknown workings man was struggling to decipher. The ostensible linearity of the scheme at the Petits-Augustins introduced a multi-dimensional celebration of time as the primary dimension of our existence, and our experience of it as a perpetual dialectics of continuity and change, universal and particular, identity and difference. Both Quatremère and Lenoir’s interpretations of the emerging phenomenon of the museum, in their different ways, saw it as an attempt to construct a much-needed map of reality through the medium of art and its relationship to the notion of history, at a time of profound changes and great uncertainty. The intellectual paths they followed in this attempt were largely similar, as were their goals, which is why the Museum of Monuments, away from circumstantial arguments, can be seen as a direct answer to Quatremère’s own questions and concerns. Quatremère may have found the PetitsAugustins inconsistent, but his own position was rather paradoxical. His assertion that the ‘real’ museum was Rome itself, monuments, hills, rivers and all,30 brings to mind the map–territory conundrum, as famously described in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded from 1893.31 Arguably, in Quatremère’s scheme of things, the desire for comprehensiveness and detail was such that his representation of the place in question had to finally coincide with the actual expanse of the territory, rendering it quite useless. Instead, the investment of the Museum of Monuments in the metaphoricity of representation made it a better map, in that it was a map at all. Unlike Quatremère’s Rome, it accepted that it could only operate allusively, through implications and traces – like Ricœur’s historians – rather than in any literal and comprehensive way. As likely through circumstance as through Lenoir’s sensitivities, the Museum of Monuments managed to articulate a tentative but meaningful response to fundamental uncertainties and impasses in culture, which Quatremère was quickest and most eloquent in identifying, but to which his own schemes fell short of responding creatively. Legacy and Oblivion The dates of both depot and museum phases at the Petits-Augustins (1791–1816) coincided with what was arguably the most troubled and consequential period in the history of museums. Never had so much significance and controversy been attached to the collection and display of art – a significance transcending the realm of art, and affecting the very structure and identity of culture. Beyond the Louvre and the Museum of Monuments, the consequences of these changes can be seen in every museum project of the nineteenth century, the great museum era, and, beyond still, in the modern attitude to art and heritage. Dominique Poulot’s insights are once again relevant here. He writes that the museum is the institution proper of a society that sees the past as a resource subject to specific laws of credibility and legitimacy – that is, where the traditional paradigm of inherited, latent hierarchies and meanings no longer applies. 156

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Such an institution responds to the need of the effective management of the past in the present, as it codifies information, creates categories and defines boundaries which channel disparate and fleeting memories into a collective and permanent monument that links cultural concepts with social activity.32 In the context of this profound shift rendering the museum inevitable, both Quatremère and Lenoir made highly significant contributions from opposite sides of the debate, which, this book has argued, have been generally underestimated or misunderstood. Despite the fact that Quatremère was highly perceptive of the dramatic changes in culture and his stance implied the inevitability of the museum, he still explicitly argued for the irreplaceability of the original context of art, offering the museum – or, rather, the version of it which he opposed – as scapegoat for a fragmentation and alienation that ran much deeper. Lenoir, on the other hand, enthusiastically embraced the possibilities opened up by precisely this fragmentation, addressing the pieces he was left with as the beginning of a new process, a new order, not the end of an old one. Quatremère articulated the inherent dangers of the museum with great erudition and eloquence, but it was Lenoir who came up with a working proposal for addressing them. Nevertheless, the model that went on to inform the great museum projects of the nineteenth century and beyond was the one so eloquently, yet misleadingly, defined by Quatremère as the black museum of alienation, where works of art became mute, like signs of a lost language, and situated meaning gave way to labels. From Paul Valéry and Theodore Adorno to Douglas Crimp and Jean-Louis Déotte, to mention just a few, a host of authors have been composing a philosophical debate of the museum, picking up their cue directly from the model identified by Quatremère de Quincy. Adorno writes that ‘the German word museal has unpleasant overtones […] because it describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying’.33 Worse even than death, the museum at the other end of modernity is a place of total chaos, where ‘anything goes’, responds Crimp: ‘Nothing could testify more eloquently to the fragility of the museum’s claims to represent anything coherent at all.’34 The Museum of Monuments was also a pioneering modern museum in that sense. Its raison d’être was the physical and semantic decontextualisation of its artefacts – that is, a fundamentally modern act, immediately resulting from the radicality of the Revolution but, ultimately, transcending it. As the earliest project where the religious was transformed into the historical, literally overnight, the Museum of Monuments claims a prominent place in the development of the modern institution, as well as the consolidation of the idea of the national historic monument and its central role in the construction of heritage. But, as this book has claimed, more important still is that rather than performing this musealisation in accordance with the dominant scholarly assumptions of its time, which went on to inform later institutions and attitudes, Lenoir’s project, owing as much to circumstance as to its author’s vision, managed to bypass them. During the closure of the Petits-Augustins, discussions were already under way for the next manifestation of a museum of French monuments, as such an institution was fundamental to the increasingly significant notion of heritage and the historical 157

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consciousness of the nation. Few of the exhibits from Lenoir’s collection were moved back to churches and cemeteries, themselves now largely musealised, while most were sent to new or modified museum institutions, as we saw in Chapter 1. The Angoulême gallery in the Louvre (1824), the museum at Versailles (1833) and the Museum of Cluny (1834) were key projects in cementing the type of sculptural and architectural pieces first put on display in Lenoir’s project as national heritage. Far from exceptional at this stage, these were projects expressing the profound shift in cultural understanding and accompanying policy regarding material culture and its role in constructing identities. Already in 1830, French Minister of the Interior François Guizot had initiated the post of Inspector of Historic Monuments, with the Commission of Historic Monuments following in 1837, charged with identifying, recording and taking all necessary action to conserve art and architectural works of significance for the nation’s memory and identity. Although the ‘Guizot moment’, as it is frequently referred to in French literature, was unambiguously pivotal in the development of heritage in France, it is essential to recognise the pioneering role of Lenoir’s museum and the debates surrounding it in developing sensibilities and testing methodologies – something which, surprisingly, seems to be less obvious than one would have expected.35 It is Dominique Poulot, once again, who provides the most pronounced exception, commenting on Guizot’s seminal report of 21 October 1830 as being ‘in near-perfect symmetry with Lenoir’s work: same methods, same means, but aiming this time for conservation in situ rather than in a museum collection’.36 Regarding the contribution of the Petits-Augustins to the ‘nationalist turn’ in art and architectural style, it is also worth noting the statement of Jean-Pierre Bady, then Director of the National Fund of Historic Monuments, in the 1979 exhibition catalogue on the origins of the Gothic Revival. In the preface, Bady credits Lenoir’s project as one of the three formative instances of the revival in the eighteenth century across Europe, and the only one in France, legitimising the ‘Gothic’ through its extensive inscription in the proto-nationalist narratives of his museum.37 It should be emphasised, nevertheless, that Lenoir was an inadvertent champion of the Gothic, if at all. For him, the Middle Ages were significant as an essential link in the history of the nation and the continuities he was seeking to manifest through his narratives, not a period warranting special mention for its artistic achievement in itself, as the Gothic Revival proper would maintain. The name Musée des Monuments Français was not to be used again until well into the twentieth century. The project started in 1879, envisaged by Gothic Revivalist architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, long experienced in conservation work for the Commission of Monuments. The project, named the Musée de la Sculpture Comparée (‘Museum of Comparative Sculpture’) aimed to offer a panorama of French sculpture and architecture from the Middle Ages to the present. It opened in 1882 under the direction of Alexandre du Sommerard and, although it was the largest collection to date of such objects, intriguingly, it consisted almost exclusively of casts and copies rather than originals, a faint echo of Lenoir’s emphasis on aesthetic experience rather than archaeological authenticity. By this time, however, the Gothic style had become fully emancipated, with the aim of shaping public taste in that direction high on the new museum’s agenda. In 1935, the Palais de Trocadero was demolished to make place 158

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for a new structure, the Palais de Chaillot, for the 1937 International Exposition. The Museum of Comparative Sculpture was reinvented as Museum of French Monuments, featuring double the floor space and an expanded collection of copies of paintings and stained glass to complete the ambience, now approximating more closely the ‘periodroom’ type of display, with emphasis on archaeological correctness and accuracy of reproduction. Closure and refurbishment ensued between 1995 and 2007, with the museum now incorporated in the multi-museum project named Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (‘City of Architecture and Heritage’). Lenoir’s project was also influential on national museum development outside France. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (‘German National Museum’) inaugurated in Nuremberg in 1853 was one of the earliest and most monumental, closely echoing the Petits-Augustins in several ways, although clearly a project of more explicit propaganda and specific nationalist agendas than its French precedent. It was also set up inside a deconsecrated Catholic monastery, investing in a holistic décor and ambience, as well as aiming to engage its visitors through the presentation of great men and women across the ages. As Francis Haskell writes, this was a vastly ambitious project, ‘intended to create a history for a nation that did not yet exist’, and ‘aiming to do no less than to exhibit German civilization as a whole’.38 As traditional structures across the world dissolved into the aspiration for nationhood, collecting material remains from the past and rationalising them as a coherent narrative became an essential tool for the construction of modern collective identity. National museums proliferated in direct relation to the speed of abandonment of inherited structures of cultural cohesion, or, to return to Pierre Nora’s insightful distinction, ‘history’ flourished where ‘memory’ faltered.39 The principles dominating these institutions in the nineteenth century and beyond overlooked the aspects that gave the original Museum of Monuments its poetic and restorative dimension. The openness, richness and ambiguity of the latter was substituted by fixed narrative schemes, streamlined political agendas, and the increasingly rigorous principles of archaeology and (art) history, both concerned with ‘authenticity’ as a scientifically defined objectivity. At the same time, the museum aspired to become fully comprehensive and universally meaningful – with the nationalist agenda expanded to include audiences outside the nation. What Duncan and Wallach have termed the ‘universal survey museum’, referring to museums aiming to map the history of art in its entirety,40 became the dominant model for all kinds of display, and defined attitudes to conservation outside museum walls. Although the poetic engagement with collective memory manifested in Lenoir’s project did not survive in the mainstream museum and heritage world, it has persisted in the margins of the institution, mainly related to private initiatives. Sir John Soane’s house and museum in London, open to architecture students since the early 1820s and to the public after Soane’s death in 1837, is perhaps the most famous of such ‘alternative’ collections. Beneath obvious differences, Soane’s project shares with Lenoir’s museum its mythopoetic aspirations, seeking an overarching order through the history of architecture, represented by fragments and investing in evocative, ambiguous narratives and juxtapositions rather than encyclopaedic totalities.41 159

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Theoretical studies identifying the problematic nature of the modern museum institution have been produced continuously since Quatremère and his contemporaries, with ‘museum malaise’ becoming a staple of twentieth-century discourses. Alongside these, alternatives to the didactic, authoritative museum institution have been developing, through a variety of speculative and actual projects. Similarly, debates about heritage have been tracing alternative possibilities to the monument as an immutable fixture that ends up paradoxically exempt from history in its attempt to record it. Whilst the intellectual and creative scope of these has been broad and fruitful, there has been relatively little study of historical precedents that might shed new light on the possible articulations of public collecting and commemoration outside established models. This reconsideration of the Museum of French Monuments can hopefully add to such scholarship, and join other instances of divergence from the national survey museum and the associated concept of heritage to serve as a viable proposal addressed to cultural practices for rethinking the role of the past in the present. Notes 1 See, for example, Description, year VI, pp. 4–5, and Musée, year VI, p. 52. 2 Musée (1810), p. 293. 3 A.C. Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art, edition including the Lettres sur l’enlèvement des ouvrages de l’art antique à Athènes et à Rome (Paris, 1989 [originally published Paris, 1836]), p. 218. 4 Quatremère de Quincy, Seconde suite aux Considérations sur les arts […] (Paris, 1791), p. 88. 5 Quatremère de Quincy, Considerations morales, pp. 15–16; Lenoir, Description, year V, p. 2. 6 Respectively in the Considérations morales, pp. 25–6, and the Rapport fait au Conseil Général, le 15 thermidor an VIII […] (Paris, 1800), pp. 37–9. 7 Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport fait au Directoire du Département de Paris sur les travaux […] au Panthéon français (Paris, year II) , p. 38; Considérations morales, pp. 50–53 and 70. 8 For example, Lenoir, ‘Histoire des arts en France prouvée par les monumens’, Musée, year X, pp. 23–4. 9 Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport fait au Directoire du Département de Paris, p. 72. 10 Ibid. 11 Quatremère de Quincy, Rapport fait au Directoire du Département de Paris, le 13 novembre 1792, l’an 1er de la République française, sur l’état actuel du Panthéon français (Paris, year I), cited in Richard Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge, MA, 1984), p. 233. 12 See the Rapport of year VIII, pp. 35–6, and Considérations morales, p. 47. 13 Fourth letter to Canova, in Considérations morales, pp. 140–41. 14 See his ‘Mémoire sur la restitution du Temple de Jupiter Olympien à Agrigent, d’après la description de Diodore de Sicile, et les fragmens qui en subsistent encore’, Histoire et mémoire de l’Institut Royal de France, Classe d’Histoire et de la Littérature Ancienne, 2 (1815); see also Anthony Vidler, The Writing of

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the inevitability of the museum the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1987), pp. 162–3. 15 First letter to Canova, in Considérations morales, p. 104. 16 Lenoir, Description, year V, p. 2. 17 Third letter to Miranda, in Considérations morales, pp. 205–6. 18 Quatremère de Quincy did not seem concerned with the paradox in his proposal: Time had woven Rome into such a coherent book, yet Time was also responsible for the dispersal of its pages. 19 Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût […] Dissertation qui a remporté, en 1785, le prix proposé par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris, 1803), p. 59. 20 Reprising a theme originally from the Rapport of year VIII, and later published in the Considérations morales, p. 48. 21 Third letter to Miranda, Considérations morales, p. 208. It is interesting that Quatremère dismissed Winckelmann’s history as mere chronology, since the German scholar himself made it clear that what he was really after was history at its broadest sense, as a ‘system’ of interpretation, which was ultimately Quatremère’s goal as well. 22 Édouard Pommier, L’art de la liberté: Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française (Paris, 1991), p. 430. 23 Considérations morales, p. 47. 24 Dictionnaire d’architecture, part of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (ed.), Encyclopédie méthodique (Paris, 1788–1825), vol. 3, p. 313. 25 Sylvia Lavin argues that it didn’t; see her Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 206. 26 Dictionnaire d’architecture, vol. 1, p. 508. 27 Fourth letter to Miranda, in Considérations morales, p. 222. 28 Jean-Louis Déotte, Le Musée, l’origine de l’esthétique (Paris, 1993), pp. 84–5. 29 Theodore Adorno, ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (London, 1967). 30 He wrote that the ‘real museum of Rome’ was composed of ‘statues, colossi, temples, obelisks, triumphant columns, therme, circuses, amphitheatres, triumphal arches, tombs, stuccoes, frescoes, bas-reliefs, inscriptions, ornaments, construction material, furniture, tools, etc. etc.’, but equally, of ‘mountains, ravines, roads, the location of cities, geographical relationships, relationships between objects, memories, local traditions, etc. etc.’; third letter to Miranda, in Considérations morales, p. 207. 31 This observation was first made by Dominique Poulot, in Musée, nation, patrimoine, 1789–1815 (Paris, 1997), p. 280. However, Poulot cites Borges as the origin of this idea, implying the story ‘On the Exactitude of Science’, first published in Fictions in 1956, whereas Lewis Carroll’s precedes it by over a century. 32 Dominique Poulot, De l’héritage monumental à l’entreprise du patrimoine. Pour une histoire de la transmission culturelle en France, XVIIIe–XXe siècles, EUI Working Papers ECS 91/3 (Florence, 1991), p. 8. 33 Adorno, ‘Valéry Proust Museum’. 34 Donald Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’, in On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p. 54.

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the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 35 One of the most widely accepted accounts of the construction of French national heritage is Françoise Choay’s The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (Cambridge, 2001 [first published in French, 1992]), especially so with English-speaking audiences, as it is one of the few volumes on the topic translated from the original French. Choay dismisses Lenoir’s project as an idiosyncratic footnote to the development of heritage, which is arguably misguided; ibid., pp. 67–9. 36 Dominique Poulot, ‘Naissance du monument historique’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, XXXII (1985), pp. 446–7. 37 Jean-Pierre Bady, Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le-Duc, exhibition catalogue (Paris, 1979), p. 3. 38 Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT, 1993), pp. 282–3. 39 See Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, trans. Mark Roudebush, Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7–25. 40 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History, 3 (1980), pp. 448–69. 41 See, for example, Donald Preziosi, ‘The Limit(s) of (Re)presentation’, in Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), pp. 137–51.

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Bibliography

Selected Publications by Alexandre Lenoir Editions of the catalogue of the Museum of French Monuments: —— Notice succincte des objets de sculpture et architecture, réunis au Dépôt provisoire national, rue des Petits-Augustins, suivi de Histoire des arts en France (Paris, 1793), 1st edn. —— Notice historique des monumens des arts, réunis au Dépôt national, rue des PetitsAugustins, suivis d’un Traité de la peinture sur verre (Paris, year IV [1795]), 2nd edn. —— Description historique et chronologique des monumens de sculpture, réunis au Musée des Monumens français […] suivie d’un Traité historique de la peinture sur verre (Paris, year V [1797] and year VI [1798]), 3rd and 4th edns. —— Description historique et chronologique des monumens de sculpture, réunis au Musée des Monumens français, augmentée d’une Dissertation sur la barbe et les costumes de chaque siècle, et suivie d’un Traité historique de la peinture sur verre (Paris, year VIII [1800]), 5th edn. —— Description historique et chronologique des monumens de sculpture, réunis au Musée des Monumens français, augmentée d’une Dissertation sur la barbe et les costumes de chaque siècle, et suivie d’un Traité historique de la peinture sur verre, augmentée du procès-verbal des exhumations de Saint-Denis (Paris, year X [1802]), 6th edn. —— Description historique et chronologique des monumens de sculpture, réunis au Musée des Monumens français, augmentée d’une Dissertation sur la barbe et les costumes de chaque siècle, et suivie d’un Traité historique de la peinture sur verre (Paris, year XI [1803] and year XII [1806]), 7th and 8th edns. —— Musée impérial des Monumens français. Histoire des arts en France prouvée par les monumens (Paris, 1810), 9th edn. —— Musée royal des Monumens français, ou Mémorial de l’histoire de France et de ses monumens (Paris, 1815 [two revised edns] and 1816), 10th, 11th and 12th edns. Other publications: —— Les amis du temps passé. Comédie en un acte et en prose (Paris, 1786). 163

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 —— Essai sur le Muséum de peinture (Paris, year II [1793–94]). —— Compte rendu sur l’état actuel du Musée des monumens français […] présenté au général Bonaparte (Paris, year VIII [1799 or 1800]). —— Musée des Monumens français, ou Description historique et chronologique des statues en marbre et en bronze, bas-reliefs et tombeaux des hommes et des femmes célèbres pour servir à l’histoire de France et à celle de l’art, ornée de gravures et augmentée d’une dissertation sur le costume de chaque siècle, par Alexandre Lenoir, fondateur et administrateur du Musée, 8 vols (Paris: Guilleminet, 1800–1821). —— Mémoire sur les sépultures d’Héloïse et d’Abélard, suivi d’un projet dans le Musée des Monumens français une chapelle sépulcrale pour y déposer leurs cendres, présenté au général Bonaparte, premier consul […] (Paris, year XI [1800 or 1801]. —— Rapport sur la restauration et l’emploi des quatre façades du château de Gaillon dans la seconde cour du Musée des Monumens français (Paris, 1803). —— Les Monumens antiques expliqués par la mythologie en forme de dictionnaire (Paris, 1806). —— Receuil d’observations sur le Déluge (Paris, 1806). —— ‘Monument celtique découvert à Paris en 1806’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, I (1807): 137–43. —— ‘Rapport sur la démolition de l’ancienne église de Sainte-Geneviève de Paris’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, I (1807): 353–4. —— ‘Mythologie celtique. Du dragon de Metz, nommé Graouilli […]’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, II (1808): 1–20. —— ‘Coup d’œil sur l’état actuel et futur du Musée des Monumens français consacré à l’histoire de l’art en France’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, IV (1809): 39–45. —— ‘Notice sur le tombeau de Dagobert et sur les chapiteaux de l’église de l’abbaye d’Austremoine en Auvergne’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, IV (1809): 1–24 [under the pseudonym Éloi Johanneau]. —— ‘Notice sur l’origine de l’architecture appelée improprement gothique’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, III (1809): 341–54. —— ‘Notice sur l’usage des vases lacrymatoires’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, III (1809): 337–40. —— ‘Observations sur les figures du temple de Montmorillon adressées à M. Siauve’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, III (1809): 18–33. —— ‘Revue des principaux monumens des différents siècles, réunis dans le Musée des Monumens français, considérés particulièrement sous le rapport de l’histoire et des progrès de l’art en France’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, IV (1809): 1–38. —— Nouvelle Explication des hiéroglyphes ou des anciennes allégories sacrées des Égyptiens […], 4 vols (Paris, 1809–21). —— Catalogue historique et raisonné des antiquités et des marbres du château impérial de la Malmaison, ordonné par sa Majesté l’Impératrice et Reine […] (Paris: Hacquart, 1810). 164

bibliography —— Nouvelle collection d’arabesques propres à la décoration des appartemens (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1810). —— ‘Description du château d’Anet’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, V (1810): 477–516. —— ‘Observations critiques sur la métempsychose’, Mémoires de l’Académie celtique, V (1810): 417–97. —— Dissertation sur les deux questions suivantes: a-t-il existé un tribunal pour juger les rois d’Égypte après leur mort? les pyramides d’Égypte étaient-elles destinées à servir de tombeaux aux rois? (Paris: Chanson, 1812). —— La Franche-Maçonnerie rendue à sa véritable origine ou L’Antiquité de la franchemaçonnerie prouvée par l’explication des mystères anciens et modernes (Paris: Fournier 1814). —— Notice historique sur les sépultres d’Héloïse et d’Abailard […] seconde restauration dans le Musée des monumens français (Paris, 1815). —— ‘Dissertation sur quelques divinités romaines qui ont passés dans les Gaules’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de France, I (1817): 109–45. —— ‘Sur le réfus de sépulture aux suicidés’, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de France, I (1817): 91–109. —— Notice historique sur le tombeau de Louis XII et d’Anne de Bretagne (Paris, 1818). —— ‘Observations sur une statue antique et en marbre de Paros […] représentant une Hermaphrodite’, Annales des bâtimens, 19 (1818). —— Observations sur l’origine et l’emploi de l’ogive dans l’architecture (Paris, 1819). —— Description historique et critique des statues, bas-reliefs, inscriptions […] du Musée Royal, d’après les dispositions prises en 1817 par M. Visconti et continuées par M. Clarac: Atlas des Monumens des arts libéraux de la France depuis les Gaulois jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1820). —— Observations scientifiques et critiques sur le génie et les principales productions des peintres et autres artistes les plus célèbres de l’Antiquité, du Moyen Âge et des temps modernes (Paris: B. Mondor, 1821; 2nd edn, Paris, 1824). —— Essai sur le Zodiaque circulaire de Denderah, maintenant au Musée du Roi (Paris: Librairie des Annales françaises, 1822). —— ‘Description d’un sarcophage égyptien’, Annales des arts, spécialement de l’architecture et des sciences y relatives, II (1825): 321–55. —— ‘Observations sur les pyramides d’Égypte’, Annales des arts, spécialement de l’architecture et des sciences y relatives, III (1827): 321–70. —— ‘Antiquités nationales Ancien musée des monumens français’, Journal des artistes, II/6 (1832): 96–9. —— Parallèle des anciens monuments mexicains avec ceux de l’Egypte, de l’Inde et du reste de l’ancien monde (Paris: Bureau des Antiquités mexicaines, 1834). —— ‘De l’École royale des beaux-arts et de l’ancien musée des Petits-Augustins’, Journal des artistes, I/23 (1836): 353–60. —— Monumens des arts libéraux mécaniques et industriels de la France, depuis les Gaulois jusqu’au règne de François Ier (Paris: V. Desray, 1818; 2nd edn, Paris: J. Teschener, 1840). 165

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177

Index

Page numbers referring to illustrations are in italics.

Céléstins, monastery of 24, 62, 65, 67 Celtic 39, 40, 54, 95-6, 98 Chamouteux, church of 55 Chateaubriand, François-René de 123 chronology, principle of 1, 4, 10, 18-23, 33, 38-40, 50, 59, 71-2, 78-81, 89, 91, 94-5, 108-11, 113, 126, 134, 142, 148-9, 152 Classical/Classicism 1, 6, 16, 19, 22, 40, 67, 75, 80, 91, 94-6, 101, 107-8, 134, 136, 138-9, 141 Cluny 23, 34, 84, 158; see also Du Sommerard, Alexandre Colardeau, Charles-Pierre 104 Condillac, Étienne de 100 Condorcet, Marquis de 6, 109 Court de Gébelin, Antoine 94, 97-8, 100, 113

When persons commemorated in the Museum of Monuments also have a significant presence elsewhere in the text, they are listed separately (eg. Montfaucon, Winckelmann etc). aesthetic experience 51, 72, 75, 78, 1001, 131, 140, 148-50, 158; see also sensationist theory Alison, Archibald Sir 123 Anet, château of 23, 31, 35, 35, 47, 48, 50, 55, 73-4, 74, 77, 84, 104 Arabic style/arabesque 57, 60, 64, 73, 80, 101 Beauvallet, Pierre-Nicolas 24 Berckheim, Karl von 81 Blondel, Jacques-François 93-4, 127 Boffrand, Germain 99 Bonet, Joseph 37-8, 80 Bon-Port, abbey of 25 Bréquigny, Louis de 9-10 British Museum 137-8, 141-2, 148, 151

Deseine, Louis-Pierre 30, 59, 105, 123-9 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall 123 Dom Poirier 16, 105 see also Saint-Denis exhumations Dupuis, Charles 94-7, 112-3 Du Sommerard, Alexandre 34, 84, 158; see also Cluny Doyen, Gabriel-François 3, 9, 13

Cambrai, cathedral of 23 Carr, John 82 Caylus, Comte de 89, 93 Prix Caylus 128, 151

École des Beaux-Arts 4, 33 Écouen, château de 72

179

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 Enlightenment 4, 6, 11, 22, 78, 90, 93-4, 96-8, 106, 109-10, 112-3, 117, 124-5, 148 enlightenment/enlightened 31, 40-2, 57, 67, 80, 93, 97, 99, 124-5, 139, 153-4

historicism 11, 81, 90-1, 97, 111, 113-4, 117, 125, 143, 127, 152 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 81, 135 imagination 19, 79, 81, 100, 101, 107, 111, 115, 123, 130, 131, 133-5, 148-9 Invalides, church of 27, 105

fabrique 20, 24-5, 28, 35, 50, 53, 57, 62, 72, 75, 77-8, 80, 100-1, 107, 113, 116-7, 126, 151 Fellowes, William Dorset 82 Feuillants, convent of 24, 68 fragment/fragmentation, philosophical concept of 114-117, 140, 152-3, 155, 157, 159 Freemasonry 97-8, 110, 153

jardin anglais 22, 107, 110 Josephine, Empress 27, 80; see also Malmaison Kersaint, Armand-Guy Comte de 9 Laugier, Marc-Antoine 93 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 83, 104 Le Brun, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre 19 Le Camus de Mézières, Nicolas 100 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 101 Locke, John 100 Louvre 1, 4, 8, 15-22, 33-4, 36, 39, 41, 50, 82, 91-3, 95-6, 102, 117, 125, 136, 138-9, 141-2, 156, 158 Lubersac, Abbé de 100 Luxembourg, gallery of 4

Gaillon, château of 23, 25, 26, 73, 74 Germanisches Nationalmuseum 159 Gothic 23, 34, 40, 60, 64, 73, 80, 84, 98, 107, 158 Governmental bodies Commission of Monuments 5-9, 14, 16-7, 24, 105 Committee for the Alienation of National Assets 13 Committee of Public Instruction 17-21, 24, 124 Committee of Public Safety 7, 15 Council for Civic Buildings 37-8, 47 General Council 128 Legislative Assembly 9, 102 Museum Commission 8, 15, 17, 19, 21, 24 Museum Conservatory 21-2, 24 National (Revolutionary) Assembly 5-7, 9 National Convention 7, 8, 15, 16, 37, Temporary Arts Commission 7, 17-8, 24 Grands-Augustins, monastery of 24 Grégoire, Henri 7-8 Guilhermy, Ferdinand Baron de 35 Guizot, François 84, 158

Magny, church/city of 25, 31 Malmaison 27, 42, 80; see also Josephine, Empress Marguerite de Valois, Queen 13 Masonry/Masonic see Freemasonry Mechel, Christian von 4 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien 79 metaphor/metaphoric 101, 114-7, 143, 155-6 Michelangelo 18, 40, 141 Michelet, Jules 34, 83-4 Middle Ages/medieval 8, 17-9, 23, 29, 34, 39, 59, 78-9, 103, 158 Millin, Aubin-Louis 6, 89 Minimes, convent of 24, 28, 30, 64 Ministers of the Interior involved with the Museum of Monuments Bénézech, Pierre 21-4, 37, 40 Bonaparte, Lucien 29, 31, 38,

heritage 2, 4, 7-9, 27, 84, 92-93, 99, 156-60 180

index Champagny, Jean-Baptise Nompère de 30, 33, 123 Chaptal, Jean-Antoine 25-6, 38, 74 Garat, Dominique, 7, 15 Neufchâteau, François de 28 Quinette, Nicolas-Marie, 32 modern/modernity xiii, 1, 4, 16, 19, 75, 81, 84-5, 89-90, 92, 94, 96-8, 106, 109, 112-4, 131, 136, 142-3, 147, 151, 1534, 156-7, 159-60 Montalembert, Charles Forbes Comte de 36 Montfaucon, Bernard de 4, 6, 30, 71, 76-7, 89, 93-4, 97, 109 monument conservation/preservation of 5-11, 14, 20, 84, 90, 123, 129-31, 158-9 historic 4, 8-11, 32, 79, 84, 89-93, 125-127, 129, 133-4, 141-2, 152, 155, 157-8 speaking 99-102, 130, 135, 150-1 Museum of Monuments Elysium 22-3, 26, 30, 51, 71, 74-6, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81, 89, 103, 107-11, 126, 148-50 halls ‒‒ fifteenth 23, 33, 40, 53, 59, 63-64, 64, 71, 72, 81, 103 ‒‒ fourteenth 23, 59, 60-62, 64, 72, 73, 83, 83, 101 ‒‒ introductory 22-3, 35, 40, 47, 50-51, 50-55, 54-5, 57, 58, 58, 68, 71-2, 74, 79, 82, 96, 104, 108, 111, 113, 126, 154 ‒‒ seventeenth 22, 67-9, 68-9, 72, 111, 126 ‒‒ sixteenth 23, 65-6, 65-6, 72-3, 81, 96, 101, 103, 105 ‒‒ thirteenth 22, 57, 58, 59, 78-9, 81, 95, 101, 103 personalities represented in the museum and its catalogue ‒‒ kings Charlemagne 31, 40 Charles I (d’Anjou) 83

Charles II (le Mauvais) 103 Charles V 31, 54 62, 72, 83 Charles VI 16, 83, 83, 103 Charles VII 82 Charles VIII 34, 103 Charles IX 105 Childebert 18, 59 Chilipéric 84 Clovis 18, 34, 40, 42, 50, 52 Dagobert I 76, 103, 109 François I 16, 18, 20, 28, 31, 40, 51, 55, 56-7, 56, 65, 65, 66, 67-8, 77, 96, 101, 104, 126 Frédégonde 40, 84 Hugues Capet 59 Henri II 16, 31, 51, 56, 67, 101, 104, Henri IV 69, 105-6 Louis IX 59-60, 76, 103 Louis XII 16, 40, 64-65, 64 Louis XIV 4, 40-1, 67, 69, 69, 105, 126 Louis XV 4, 41 Louis XVIII 105 Pepin le Bref 59 Philippe le Gros 59 ‒‒ others Alençon, Catherine de 72 Birague, René de 105 Boileau, Nicolas 28, 71, 74, 75, 109 Chabot, Admiral 66, 67 Clisson, Olivier de 31 Corneille, Pierre 33 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 41, 69 Commines, Philippe de 64, 65, 96 Courtanvaux, Giles de Souvré de 68, 68 Drouais, François-Hubert 30, 42 Descartes, René 28, 30, 33, 71, 75, 109 Desportes, Philippe 25 Du Guesclin, Bertrand 31 Estrées, Gabrielle de 72 181

the museum of french monuments 1795–1816 Héloïse and Abelard 25, 29, 35, 36, 59, 77, 77, 82, 104-7, 109, 111, 124 Jeanne d’Arc 82 La Fontaine, Jean de 28, 35, 36, 71, 74, 75, 106, 109 Le Brun, Charles 41, 67-8, 126 Louis d’Orléans (also ‘de France’) 72 L’Hôpital, Michel de 31, 54, 55, 74, 77, 104, 109 Mabillion, Jean 30, 109 Mazarin, Cardinal 51, 68 Molière 28, 33, 35, 36, 71, 74, 106, 109 Montmorency, Anne de 51, 57, 109 Navarre, Pierre de 72, 103 Orgemont, Pierre de 54 Orléans, Philippe and Charles 65, 103 Orléans-Longueville, family of 65, 68 Poitier, Diane de 25, 31-2, 35, 55, 55, 74, 77, 84, 101, 104, 106, 109 Racine, Jean 28, 33, 71, 74, 75 Rouhault, Jacques 30, 75, 75 Rouville, Renier de 25 Richelieu, Cardinal 18, 20, 51, 53, 54, 68 Sorel, Agnes de 82 Thou, family of 14 Turenne, General 27-8, 71, 105, 109 Valentine de Milan 71, 72 Villeroy, family of 25, 31 ‒‒ queens Anne de Bretagne 65 Béatrix de Bourbon 59 Blanche 50, 52, 54-5 Catherine de Medici 51, 67, 105 Clotilde 50, 52 Jeanne de Bourbon 62, 82-3 Marguerite of Austria 103-4

Mary Queen of Scots 82 ‒‒ Sculptors Anguier, Michel 68, 70 Bontemps, Pierre 57, 67 Bullant, Jean 40, 51, 55, 66, 77, 104 Cousin, Jean 40, 67, 104 Coysevox, Antoine 51, 68 Girardon, François 20, 27, 51, 68, 70 Goujon, Jean 25, 40, 67, 77, 104 Le Sueur, Hubert 68 L’Orme, Philibert de 40, 57, 66, 74 Mazières, Simon 27 Pilon, Germain 40, 51, 55-7, 67, 104-5, Prieur, Barthélemy 67 Sarrazin, Jacques 14, 68 Slodtz, René-Michel 27 Trebati, Paul Ponce 65 myth myths/mythical time/mythology in the museum 79, 95-7, 106, 110, 126, 152, 154-5 work on myth/mythopoesis as distinct from mythology 10-11 110, 112-7, 148, 152,154-5, 159 Napoleon Bonaparte 23, 26, 32, 42, 80, 82, 93-4, 136 nature as cradle of history/natura naturans 11, 91, 94, 98, 106-12, 132, 136, 149, 152; see also origins as model for the arts and aesthetic experience 19, 30, 133; see also sensationist theory Niemeyer, Augustus Hermann, 83 Notre Dame, cathedral of 24, 37-8, 50, 72, 80, 96, 124 origins of civilization 11, 80, 84, 93-100, 108, 110-1, 114, 128, 133, 142, 153; see also nature 182

index Pantheon 33, 82, 102, 106, 108, 111, 128, 149-50; see also Sainte-Geneviève Paraclet, monastery of 29, 82 Percier, Charles 43 Père Lachaise, cemetery of 34-6, 36, 37, 81 personality, commemoration of 10, 24, 28, 31, 42, 68-9, 78, 81-4, 102-6, 108, 111, 114, 133, 149 Petit-Radel, Louis-François 38 Petits-Pères, convent of 24, 32 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostôme 1, 3, 4, 6, 11, 33-4, 98, 102, 118, 123, 127-43, 147-60

Saint-Étienne-du-Mont 24, 28 Saint-Germain-des-Prés 18, 24, 30 Saint-Gervais 31, 68 Saint-Marcel, Chalon-sur-Saône 25, 29 Saint-Père, Chartres 64 Sainte-Chapelle 24, 28, 62-3 Sainte-Geneviève 24, 30, 33, 36, 56, 102, 128, 149; see also Pantheon Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 81 sensationist theory 100, 110, 131 sentiment 10-11, 79, 81, 100, 106, 110111, 130-4, 140, 148-9 Soane, John Sir, 80-1 house and museum of 159 Sorbonne, chapel of 20, 24, 51 Stevenson, William 79

Peyre, Antoine-Marie 24, 67 Pinkerton, John 79, 81 Plumptre, Anne 82 Pommereul, François 78 Pope, Alexander 82, 104 Puthod de Maisonrouge, François 9

Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de 6 Taylor, Isidor Baron de 34 Thierry, Augustin 34, 84 utility, Enlightenment concept of 19, 125 moral utility of art 11, 132-3, 136, 140, 142, 148

Raphael 40, 64, 72 Rees van Tets, Henrica 81 Renaissance 1, 6, 19, 23, 34, 40, 50, 64-5, 79, 96, 136, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 75, 75, 99, 107-8

vandalism 1, 6, 8, 20, 22-5, 39-40, 126-7, 130 Vaudoyer, Antoinde-Laurent 24 Versailles, museum of 21, 34, 36, 158 Vinet, Ernest 84 Vivant-Denon, Dominic 27, 33, 106

Saint-André-des-Arts 24-5, 55 Saint-Denis 9, 24, 30, 32-3, 36, 59, 62. 65, 67, 76, 96, 98 exhumation of royal tombs cover, 7, 16, 17, 42, 105

Winckelmann, Johan Joachim, 19, 30, 40, 91, 94, 97, 152

183