Mythologie et art poétique. L'Antiquité dans la théorie de l'architecture régénérée de Ledoux

Abstract

Daniel Rabreau : Mythology and poetic art. Antiquity in Ledoux'S regenerated architectural theory. Ledoux was one of the French architects with the most sites under construction during the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, but his career was broken by the Revolution. In 1804 he published a great illustrated work which was his artistic testament, a theory of architecture and an encyclopœdia of art and history for the use of posterity (general public and students of architecture). He was considered as one of the reformers of the classical architecture of his time, but after more than a century of neglect, 20th-century critics see him as an Utopian visionary anticipating modernist purity (E. Kaufmann). A study of the 1804 text and illustrations devoted to classical poetic art, mythology and Greco-Roman history, show that Ledoux's literary and symbolic objectives were to regenerate the architecture of his time by making it speak like an epic poem or a historical painting. This poetico-historical dimension of classical Antiquity, a sort of Ut architectura poesis, which guides his reform of classical architecture, has never before been brought out.