Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) was celebrated during his lifetime as the greatest European writer on the arts. The architect Sir John Soane admired his essay on Egyptian architecture while Hegel considered his research on ancient Greek polychromatic sculpture a masterpiece.
Despite the breadth of Quatremère’s writings, today he is famous for inventing an idea that he never embraced: namely, that art should remain in its original context because displacing it in museums changed its meaning and neutered its power.
While researching my biography of Quatremère, I discovered that his attitude towards museums was surprisingly positive.
The years that he spent in Italy during his twenties shaped his outlook. The sight of antiquities excavated from Herculaneum in the nearby royal palace at Portici led him to propose site museums ‘like those in Italy’ once he returned home. Why not reuse the ancient baths in Paris and the amphitheatre in Nîmes as museums of Gallo-Roman antiquities, he asked?
In Italy, Quatremère also studied in large museums. He found that the papacy’s ‘sumptuous galleries’ in Rome revalorized pagan artefacts as objects of beauty and knowledge. Indeed, the city itself, he later remarked, was a museal microcosm of world geography and history. Far from opposing the displacement of artworks from their original contexts, he remarked how artefacts imported from afar during antiquity had been resurrected in Rome when they took on new meanings and roles. For instance, he found that the Egyptian figures (now believed to be Roman telamons) greeting visitors to the Museo Pio-Clementino had a purpose no less authentic than their original one: ‘by making them support the corniche that decorated the magnificent entrance’, Pius VI had ‘returned them to their first destination’.
Quatremère returned from Italy convinced that it was necessary to centralize artworks in capital museums. He therefore joined the chorus of support for a national museum in the Louvre. Despite his antipathy towards the Revolution, in 1791 he proposed transforming the palace into a ‘temple of knowledge’. After the museum finally opened in August 1793, its administrators relied upon his expertise. For instance, in 1797, he examined thousands of paintings to determine what to share with the Special Museum of the French School in Versailles. Despite previously opposing the spoliation of Italy to enrich the Louvre, in 1807 he applauded Napoleon for amassing ‘treasures of genius from all centuries’.
During the Bourbon Restoration, he defended the Louvre with greater zeal because its fortunes aligned with his royalist politics. He criticized but failed to prevent ‘dishonourable’ demands to return seized artworks to their original countries. He penned a memorandum about rehanging what remained and recommended acquiring replacement antiquities such as a Parthenon metope from Choiseul-Gouffier’s collection. In 1821, he boasted that the newly imported Venus de Milo was ‘the rarest and most valuable item in our Museum’.
Quatremère’s pride in the Louvre did not prevent him supporting capital museums elsewhere. He was delighted, for example, to inspect the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. Lord Elgin saved these antiquities from the ‘barbarian’ Ottomans, he opined, and their ‘handsome arrangement’ in London was ‘even better than on the Parthenon itself’.
During his youthful Italian travels, Quatremère also admired energetic and enlightened private collectors such as Stefano Borgia and Ignazio Biscari. Their example taught him that private collecting benefited everyone, even if some avaricious collectors ‘amassed for the sake of amassing’. In France, he therefore praised Grivaud de la Vincelle, whose ‘patriotic’ efforts helped mitigate the absence of a national museum of antiquities, and Léon Dufourny, whose well-ordered and accessible collection served ‘public utility’. During the second half of Quatremère’s life, he created a sizable collection of his own in his mansion on the Rue de Condé, Paris: at his death, he owned around 3,000 printed volumes, numerous modern artworks, ancient Greek vases, Egyptian figurines, ex-votos seized from the temples of Asclepius and Hygeia, and small figures excavated in Italy.
Far from being a museophobe, then, Quatremère enthused about site museums, capital museums, and private collections alike. His published writings provide direct and indirect explanations for why he considered museums indispensable.
For Quatremère, the future of art depended upon museums because artists must study the ‘corpus of lessons and models’ from antiquity and the modern revival. If ancient Greek artists had perfected art without collections, he theorized that the moderns could never recover the causes of ancient greatness and must therefore turn to museums: ‘In the current state of things, God forbid that artists should be deprived of their assistance!’ Artists could only improve, moreover, if their judges understood beauty, which required a mental ‘ladder of comparison’ that one must calibrate carefully through studying many artworks.
Museums were also integral to the advancement of knowledge. During the eighteenth century, he reflected, the enrichment of museums enabled the ‘spirit of observation’ to triumph over the ‘spirit of system’. Since the consolidation of scattered artefacts into major collections finally enabled objects to ‘illuminate and explain one another’, he predicted that future scholars would discern new connections, decode patterns, improve taxonomies, and identify fakes.
In Quatremère’s mind,good museums therefore facilitated scholarly efforts to preserve and interpret authentic vestiges of the past whereas bad museums undermined this endeavour. He railed at the Museum of French Monuments precisely because he believed that its director, Alexandre Lenoir, presided over a ‘workshop of demolition’ that creatively restored medieval sculptures to illustrate period rooms. Lenoir’s superficial decorative needs and anachronistic assumptions discoloured the past and offended Quatremère’s sense of art and politics. For Quatremère, respect for past mentalities via authentic reminders of the past was the ultimate antidote to presentist dogmatism: ‘only the history of peoples, monuments, and the arts of antiquity’, he observed, ‘can expand the philosopher’s horizon and transform into a complete theory the fleeting observations that the brevity of human life otherwise condemns us to make.’
Featured image by Edoardo Bortoli on Unsplash.
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