Viollet-le-Duc on drawing, photography, and the ‘space outside the frame’

Abstract

A small cache of documents held in a Paris archive holds tantalizing implications for the study of the role of the nascent art of photography in nineteenth-century architectural thinking. An investigation of the publishing history of Viollet-le-Duc's 1877 L'Art russe 1 at the French Ministry of Culture's Bibliothèque et Archives du Patrimoine turned up a folio containing thirty-four uncatalogued and unpublished early photographs of Russian monuments that had been donated to the library by the architect's descendants in the 1960s.2 Several of the photographs bear the dated imprints of their makers; many were made in 1867 by the Moscow commercial studio of Mikhail Nastiukov, where several of Russia's earliest artist-photographers apprenticed in the 1860s and 70s.3 A number show riparian landscapes featuring jagged architectural silhouettes cutting across a bleached sky. Nastiukov's view of the Church of St John Chrysostom at Korovniki is typical of these, showing one of many striking ensembles constructed in Yaroslavl, a merchant town on the Volga trade route that prospered in the seventeenth century (figure 1). Similar images were published by the same photographer in his 1867 album Volga Valley Landscapes from Tver to Kazan, the record of an unofficial Russian-style 'mission heliographique' that took on the task, like its French predecessor in 1851, of documenting the nation's architectural treasures.4 One photograph of non-Russian origin is an engraved daguerrotype of the sixteenth-century Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed in Moscow, drawn from one of the first photographic albums published in France — optician Lerebours' Excursions daguerriennes of 1839.5 No documents accompanied the original donation to explain how these photographs came into the possession of the family, or, indeed, whether they had belonged to the nineteenthcentury architect himself or to his son, who had later taken over as director of the Service des Monuments historiques; their papers were co-mingled in the Rue Drouot attic. But the objects themselves bear a telling clue to their origin — the original handlers of the photographs had amended their captions by hand, and the graceful pen that translated the printed Russian legends into French was that of Viktor Butovsky, Director of the Museum of Art and Industry in Moscow, and the principal Russian sponsor of Viollet-le-Duc's book project.6