" 'Must the Arts Suffer from the Progress of Reason?' Four Slave Statues, the 1790 Place des Victoires Debate, and the Urban Monument in Early Revolutionary France" Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 80 (1), 2017, pp. 108-126. (double blind peer-review) (original) (raw)
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This article examines the multiple meanings attributed to the 1818 restoration of the statue of Henri IV in Paris within the context of the French Restoration's contest over memory. It first examines the meaning of Henri IV over time and the meaning of the statue's location, and then considers the meaning of the crowd in visual and textual depictions of the ceremony to restore the statue. The article argues that the statue of Henri IV at the moment of its 1818 resurrection simultaneously symbolized the legitimacy of the restored monarchy, reconciliation following a long period of civil conflict, and the legitimate authority of the crowd.
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1998
During the first half of the Nineteenth Century the dynamic of public commemoration was largely played out in the Parisian cemetery rather than in the capital. Particularly at Pere Lachaise, most of the social and political changes of the capital below were mirrored and to a certain degree, the political identities of the living were actively being formulated through the erection of monuments. The purpose of this work is to illustrate, through a number of examples, that dynamic between city and cemetery. Late eighteenth-century legislation and debates evolved to allow a variety of socio-political groups the opportunity of carving out their own spheres of identity and status in the cemetery. Like ideas about death and religious beliefs, previously used as the basis for a collective analysis of funeral monuments, this establishment of socioeconomic and political identities may be perceived as a unifying function for a seemingly disparate group of monuments. During the Restoration, Par...
Architecture, Race, and Enlightenment in France
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2021
encountered conditions of constant flux that demanded grounding, even if only discursively. Attempts to elucidate accounts of historical violence toward specific bodies may appear anachronistic, yet we inhabit at least as many pasts as we experience presents and imagine futures. Scholars of bondage in the early modern Mediterranean have increasingly attended to the visualizations of corporeal violence on armaments and monuments-tattered clothing, bound limbs, hunched backs, and contorted faces-as projections of one people's moral and martial superiority over another. 4 Contemporary historians, artists, and publics have also suggested other ways in which such images (and bodies as images) should be treated. 5 More so than the representation of a living body, but seldom scrutinized, the corpse inhabits a liminality between personhood and object. 6 One could reframe the orientations of flotsam corpses visualized by de Contreras and al-Qadiri as manifestations of racialized truths occurring upon and within the landscape. Exhuming the specters of discriminatory epistemologies that they contain not only reveals the theological and political dynamics we have inherited from the past but also may help to explain our persistent, resounding indifference to the flotsam bodies of today.
Canadian Journal of History
The Monument's End: Public Art and the Modern Republic
2024
Monuments occupy a controversial place in nations founded on principles of freedom and self-governance. It is no accident that when we think of monuments, we think of statues modeled on legacies of conquest, domination, and violence. The Monument’s End reveals how the artists, architects, poets, and scholars of the early modern Netherlands contended with the profound disconnect between the public monument and the ideals of republican government. Their experiences offer vital lessons about the making, reception, and destruction of monuments in the present. In the seventeenth century, the newly formed Dutch Republic dominated world trade and colonized vast overseas territories even as it sought to shed the trappings of its imperial past. Marisa Anne Bass describes the frustrated attempts by figures such as Rembrandt van Rijn and playwright and poet Joost van den Vondel to reimagine public memory for their emergent nation. She shows how the most celebrated age of Dutch art was more an age of bronze than of gold, one in which the pursuit of freedom from domination was constantly challenged by the commercial ambitions of empire. Exploring how the artists and intellectuals of this vibrant century asked questions that still resonate today, this beautifully illustrated book discusses works by contemporary artists such as Spencer Finch and Thomas Hirschhorn and offers new perspectives on monuments like the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and events such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691238807/the-monuments-end?srsltid=AfmBOoooKFFfmucxSsKP24qVVlp095YeZWEP05SBfiOq3AEml\_2QIzXN