Overview
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.
Synopsis
This pioneering book chronicles the transformation of public art in eighteenth-century France. 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.
Library Journal
This book is an admirable attempt to show how public art of the French Enlightenment reflected the shift of authority from the church and hereditary aristocracy to the French nation and its emerging democratic institutions. However, the text is so full of unnecessary jargon and arcane phraseology that this reviewer spent one-half hour just making sense of the first few pages. Naginski (architectural history, Graduate Sch. of Design, Harvard) assumes the reader understands concepts such as "the dialectic of monument and countermonument" and "revolutionary vandalism" and is willing to wade through sentences beginning with "Hence, notwithstanding the impact of precursors and contemporaneous skirmishes…" However, no undergraduate would be able to follow her train of thought effortlessly. VERDICT Although well researched, thoroughly documented, and beautifully illustrated, this book has limited appeal; purchase if you cater to specialists and graduate students only.—Nancy J. Mactague, Aurora Univ. Lib., IL