Description

This pioneering book chronicles the transformation of public art in eighteenth-century France. As royal and ecclesiastical authority waned under the rule of Louis XV, there emerged nascent democratic institutions, a new metaphysics, and a radical political consciousness—a paradigm shift that profoundly marked the forms that commemorative sculpture and architecture took. As a French Catholic heritage gave way to more civic-minded and secular views of posterity, how was the monument reinterpreted? How did works by Clodion, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Augustin Pajou, Marie-Joseph Peyre, and Jacques Germain Soufflot, among others, speak to the aesthetic philosophies of Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire? Analyzing an extraordinary range of artistic projects—from unrealized plans for a Bourbon memorial to the sculptural program for the Pantheon—Erika Naginski appraises how the Enlightenment art of res publica intersected with historical forces, social movements, and continental philosophies that brought Western culture to the cusp of modernity.

About the Author

Erika Naginski is associate professor of architectural history at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Praise For…

 “This book is a spectacularly sustained structure, combining some synthesis of other people’s work with a great deal of original research.”—The Burlington Magazine

 “These subjects have been studied in detail before, but never so exhaustively. In each chapter, an impressive body of evidence from a wide variety of sources is brought together to illustrate the central argument.”—The Art Newspaper

 “Erika Naginski’s Sculpture and the Enlightenment brings art historical erudition, a broad knowledge of cultural history and historiography, and an acute critical intelligence to these reconstructions of how French artists and the state, before and during the Revolution, translated Enlightenment principles into public art.”—H-France Review

“An analytical study rich in archival and historical documentation.”—Eighteenth-Century Studies 

“Successfully argues that often overlooked eighteenth-century French public sculptures were intriguing and crucial materializations of Enlightenment debates about death and desire, the future public heroism, and symbolic destruction.”—Art Bulletin

“Sculpture and Enlightenment should convince all scholars of the significant intellectual interest of sculptural monuments as particularly representative forms of public art in the period leading to the French Revolution.”—New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century

“Richly learned in its sources, impressively ambitious in its conceptual framework, and eloquently written, this is a remarkable text.”—caa.reviews