Quatremère de Quincy:Art and Politics during the French Revolution

Gilks, David (2024) Quatremère de Quincy:Art and Politics during the French Revolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 9780198745563

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Abstract

Antoine-Chrysosthôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) was the most distinguished writer on art and architecture at the end of the enlightenment. However, as David Gilks shows in Quatremère de Quincy: Art and Politics during the French Revolution, he was never simply an esoteric antiquarian and theoretician; he was also a zealous functionary and skilled publicist whose writings on the arts often served political purposes. Quatremère de Quincy: Art and Politics during the French Revolution demonstrates how Quatremère's early writings on art and antiquity formed the foundation for a politics grounded in faith, authority, and hierarchy that favoured gradual social and political evolution over destruction and experimentation. Gilks then traces how Quatremère set aside his antiquarian research and became a royalist politician and publicist during the revolutionary decade. Quatremère feared that the Revolution would destroy the cosmopolitan republic of letters that had flourished when states across Europe supported the papacy's rediscovery of the past, restoration of taste and, revival of learning. Yet Gilks reveals that Quatremère was also a resourceful and an opportunistic political actor who deployed his opponents' language for strategic reasons. Gilks therefore reinterprets Quatremère's interventions by situating them in their polemical contexts and treating them as contributions to debates and quarrels, by locating his sources and reconstructing his social and political networks. The resulting study revises our understanding of Quatremère's famous reflections on the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the Panthéon, art plunder, and museums, but it also discovers and sheds light on previously ignored writings. Although the study focuses on the period 1789-1799, it examines the second half of Quatremère's life to substantiate his commitment to crown and altar and show how he fought against the Revolution's legacy of godless materialism and calculation that was inimical to the arts.

Item Type:	Book
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	15 Nov 2024 15:30
Last Modified:	18 Dec 2024 01:08
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97698
DOI:

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