Classics at the Dawn of the Museum Era: The Life and Times of Antoine Chrysostome Quatremre De Quincy (1755–1849)

Abstract

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 imagination supplies the centuries that are long past. . . . Such was the effect, almost a kind of magic, produced by Winckelmann ’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 Winckelmann had achieved widespread fame first as a pamphleteer ; his Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Artworks in Painting and Sculpture was published to great acclaim in arion 22.1 spring/summer 2014 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 famous 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 refashioning 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; Albani 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, articulated this seismic shift in spiritual perception whereby “pagan idols” rapidly came to be viewed as premier examples of “fine art.” Albani, in his capacity as Cardinal Librarian, continued to work on the northern wing of the Apostolic Palace—overseeing 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 Italian ) was published.4 Just four years later, Napoleon, who classics at the dawn of the museum...