The Life and Times of Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère De Quincy (1755–1849)

Classics at the Dawn of the Museum Era: The Life and Times of Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère De Quincy (1755–1849) LOUIS A. RUPRECHT, JR. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, for someone not resident in Rome to write anything substantial about ancient art or obscure antiquities; even a few years in Rome is insufficient, as I myself have learned despite laborious preparation. It is not surprising when someone says that he can find no unknown inscriptions in Italy: . one must know how to seek them out, and a traveler will find them only with difficulty. —Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, Preface Such was the effect, such was the fate of antiquity in the period I describe, when I visited Rome for the first time. Everything about this magical city contributed to entice my passion for antiquity and to enhance the beautiful illusions that enable us to recover the past and give it reality in the present, this radiance with which the imag- ination supplies the centuries that are long past. Such was the effect, almost a kind of magic, produced by Winck- elmann’s genius as well as by the spectacle of Roman antiquity. But this effect, it must be said, could only be produced in Rome, and by Rome. In vain do we convince ourselves that the antiquities taken from that city today can preserve their virtue. Everywhere else they are sterile, since everywhere else they lack the power deriving from their place; everywhere else they are disenchanted. They become images for which there is no mirror. —Quatremère de Quincy, Le Jupiter Olympien, Avant Propos introduction two years ago, I published a book in which I laid out the primarily archival evidence that confirmed Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s (1717–1768) critical role in the creation of the Vatican’s first fully public Classical art museum.1 Winck- elmann had achieved widespread fame first as a pamphlet- eer; his Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Artworks in Painting and Sculpture was published to great acclaim in arion 22.1 spring/summer 2014 134 classics at the dawn of the museum era 1755. He is also commonly recalled as the “father” of modern Art History; his History of the Art of Antiquity was published in 1764. Both books were designed to steer European aesthetics in the direction of Neoclassicism, and away from what he deemed Baroque “bad taste.”2 Winckelmann moved to Rome in the same year that his Reflections were published, and later secured the patronage of the most fa- mous art collector in Europe, Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692–1779), who was appointed by Pope Clement xiii to be the Vatican’s Cardinal Librarian in 1761. Winckelmann was nominated as Papal Antiquarian in 1763,3 and at that same time, the Bibliotecario Albani arranged a position for him at the Vatican Library. Together, the two men curated the Vatican’s first “Profane Museum,” a small collection that opened inside the Apostolic Palace in 1767. Clearly, we are in the presence of some subtle and complicated refash- ioning of the religious landscape of Early Modern Europe. Winckelmann was murdered in Trieste just one year after the Museo Profano was opened to public viewing, but his Neoclassical vision had by then been well established; Al- bani had helped see to that. And yet, in order to justify the public display of statues of pagan gods and goddesses, most of them rendered in the nude, and all of them housed inside the Apostolic Palace, it was essential to shift the way in which such objects were seen. Winckelmann, so I argue, ar- ticulated this seismic shift in spiritual perception whereby “pagan idols” rapidly came to be viewed as premier exam- ples of “fine art.” Albani, in his capacity as Cardinal Librarian, continued to work on the northern wing of the Apostolic Palace—over- seeing the construction of large new rooms like the Rotonda, the Greek Cross, the Muses, and the Octagonal Cortile— which house many of the Vatican’s most important Greek and Roman statuary to this day. This new Vatican Museum was completed at sometime around 1792, when the first bilingual guide to the Vatican Museum (in French and Ital- ian) was published.4 Just four years later, Napoleon, who Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. 135 was then leading the Revolutionary French forces in their northern Italian campaigns, made the expropriation of one hundred works of art a condition of the peace (first at the Armistice of Bologna, 23 June 1796, and later in the Treaty of Tolentino, 19 February 1797) that the Papal States were forced to sign.5 The temporary transfer of the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön Group, the Belvedere Torso, the Belvedere Hermes/Antinous and the rest served to transform the Louvre into the preeminent European museum for nearly twenty years. In that same year, however, an aspiring young French classicist, Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849), published a series of seven open letters that condemned the French looting of the Vatican as an act incompatible with the values of the Revolution, and more in line with the imperialism of the old order. Quatremère’s Let- ters to [General] Miranda won him an enthused following among radicalized artists in Paris, even as it won him the ire of more reactionary elements in the regime. His Revolution- ary fortunes, like those of many another moderate in those unsettled times, soured after 1793. He stepped down from the Pantheon project in March of 1794 when a warrant was issued for his arrest on March 2nd, and he appears to have been imprisoned in Les Magdelonnettes in April or May. Several delightful vignettes have come down to us, suggest- ing that he used his time to return to his first love, sculpture, creating clay models in his cell. He was released in the general amnesty of 27 July 1794, but then was sentenced to death in absentia after the Vendémiaire uprising (5 October 1795) that he had supported. He escaped to exile in Ger- many (at Holstein, where he stayed with the philosopher, Ja- cobi), then returned to Paris once again under the general amnesty of 9 November 1799.6 He eventually joined the French Academies he had a hand in reforming in the early years of the Revolution, where he enjoyed a prolific career of producing lectures and scholarly publications until his re- tirement in the early 1830s. He was appointed to the French Institute’s Classe de l’Histoire in 1804 after which he began 136 classics at the dawn of the museum era publishing what were to be his most important scholarly works, such as Le Jupiter Olympien. The year after that text’s publication, he was nominated to be Permanent Secre- tary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (that was in 1816; he served through 1839).7 Also in 1816, the Classe d’Histoire became the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, the primary state-sponsored Academy to which he would devote his energy and care. Quatremère has been unfairly remembered as “the French Winckelmann,” a charge that sticks in the English-speaking world primarily because so little of his work has ever been translated. Admittedly, the term, “le Winckelmann française,” also appears in René Schneider’s foundational 1910 study, L’Esthétique classique chez Quatremère de Quincy (1805–1823), but as an opinion falsely held by some of his contemporaries. For Schneider, “Winckelmann was, in his time, the great reformer of taste in Europe and the cre- ator of Art History: but that time had passed . Qua- tremère is far too superficially made into his stand-in.”8 In Schneider’s view, Quatremère was far more an activist and interventionist than he was a staid classical scholar: “The truth is that this vigorous athlete, as powerful in thought as he was in action, organized the ideal-antique school (l’école idéalo-antique) in 1791, carried the battle forward from 1816 to 1830, then fought a rearguard action from 1830 to 1839.”9 Such a description alone might well make him a person of singular contemporary interest. In fact, Quatremère was the premier Art Historian and Classicist of his generation. While there is a relatively large body of biographical and analytic work on Quatremère in French,10 studies in English have been more rare and difficult to access. The two finest sources of biographical infor- mation for his early scholarly formation are both unpublished doctoral dissertations: Eric Rauth’s “The Work of Memory: Ekphrasis, Museums and Memorialism in Keats, Quatremère de Quincy, Balzac and Flaubert” (Prince- ton University, 1990); and Thomas F. Rowlands’s impressive Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. 137 four-volume “Quatremère de Quincy: The Formative Years, 1785–1795” (Northwestern University, 1987).11 And Sylvia Lavin’s marvelous 1992 study, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture, does an excellent job of explaining why architecture figured so prominently in Quatremère’s writings, both early and late, and how novel was his overarching theory that architecture might be meaningfully compared to human language, since both were conventional, socially embedded, and the product of human artifice.12 Quatremère shows us not what apish imitation of Wincklemann’s Neoclassicism looked like in the nineteenth century, but rather what these two overlapping disciplines had become in the generation after Winckel- mann. In my view, Quatremère was formed by three crucial developments that Winckelmann did not, and could not, know: the French Revolution and its chaotic aftermath; the combined academic and cultural influence of Hegelian (or perhaps we should simply say German Idealist)13 aesthetics; and the establishment of the museum era in Europe.

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