Voyage: Dominique–Vivant Denon and the Transference of Images of Egypt

Abstract

Abigail Harrison Moore is a lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She recently obtained her PhD from the University of Southampton, entitled Imagining Egypt: The Regency Furniture Collections at Harewood House, Leeds and Nineteenth–Century Images of Egypt. Her current research focuses on the theory, history and historiography of material culture and museum studies.Focusing on the images in Dominique–Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute d’Egypte (1802), this article explores the relationship between Denon’s illustrations of Egypt and the creation of a politically charged style of design in France and England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The process of transcribing a historic site creates something that is at once removed from its original situation and, thus, the meaning of the image is altered depending upon its context of use. Previous regimes had turned to revivalism and its powerful aura of the past to support their hegemonic activities in the present, and Denon is shown to use the past to define the present in post–Revolutionary France. By using the example of Voyage and theorizing it by way of resources provided in the work of Roland Barthes, this essay aims to explain some of the processes that reconfigured the image of Egypt in France and England at the beginning of the nineteenth century.