The Florentine Revival of Late Nineteenth-Century French Sculpture Perspectives from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1861-81)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how French sculpture briefly resumed the impasse in which it was stuck in the middle of the nineteenth century thanks to the reliance on fifteenth-century Florentine sculpture. An analysis of the commentaries made by the critics of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which was the first journal to assess and promote neo-Florentine sculptors in the 1860s and 1870s, allows to better grasp the evolution and failure of the trend, as well as the various issues that were at stake, such as originality and naturalism in sculpture. This revival provided French art with a new generation of successful sculptors and inspiring works that eventually lead to the unprecedented – and short-lived – triumph of sculpture at the Exposition Universelle of 1878.