Classics at the Dawn of the Museum Era: The Life and Times of Antoine

Chrysostome Quatremre De Quincy (17551849)

Winkcleman tiene un rol critic en la crion del primer museo enteramente de

arte clsico del vaticano. Winckelmann primero haba sido conocido por sus
reflexiones en la imitacin de obras griegas en la pintura y escultura, se le
llama el padre de la historia del arte moderna. Se fue a roma y se aseguro el
patronaje del coelccionista de arte mas famoso de europa, el cardenal
alessandro albani el cual fue comendado por el papa clemente xiii para ser el
bibliotecario del cardenal del vaticano. Winckelmann fue nomidado como
anticuario papal y al mismo tiempo el bibliotecario albani le busco una
posicin en la biblioteca del vticano. Juntos curaron el primer museo profano
del vaticano, una pequea coleccin que abri dentro del palacio apostlico en
1767. Claramente estamos en presencia de un sutil y remodelador panorama
religioso de la europa moderna antigua.

Lo mataron un ao despus de que el museo profano se abriera a publico, pero

su bision neoclsica se haba establecido y albani haba ayudado. Y, sin
embargo, para justificar la exhibicin a publico de estatuas de dioses y diosas
paganas, muchos de ellos desnudos y ubicados dentro del palacio apostlico,
fue esencial cambiar el modo de ver los objetos. Winckelmann, digo yo,
articulo este cambio ssmico en la percepcin espiritual en donde los dolos
paganos rpidamente comenzaron a ser vistos como los primeros ejemplos de
las bellas artes.

Albani en su capacidad de bibliotecario cardenal, continuo trabajando en el ala

norte del palacio apostlico viendo la construccin de grandes habitaciones
como la rotonda de la cruz romana, las musas, y el cortilio romano- los cuales
albergaban la mayor cantidad de importantes estatuas romanas y griegas de
esa fecha. Este nuevo museo vaticano se completo hacia 1792 cuando la
primera gua bilinge del museo vaticano fue publicado (italiano y francs).
Cuatro aos despus, napoleon, quien lideraba la revolucin francesa forz las
campaas norteas italianas y expropio cientos de obras de arte a condicin de
la paz que los estados papales se vieron forzados a firmar. Estos sirvieron para
tranformar el Louvre en un museo europeo prominente por casi veinte aos. En
ese mismo ao, sin emabrgo, un joven aspiranteclasisista francs, quatremere
de Quincy, publico una serie de cartas abiertas que condenaban la
expropiacin del vaticano como un acto incompatible con los valores de la
revolucin y que estaba mas en lnea con el imperialismo del antiguo orden.
Sus cartas al general miranda le ganaron una fanaticada creciente entre
artistas radicalizados en pars, aun cuando le gano la ira de elementos mas
reaccionarios en el rgimen. Sus fortunas revolucionarias, como las de muchos
otros moderados en esos tiempos, agriargon despus de 1793. Se bajo del
proyecto del panten en marzo del 1974 cuando lo arrestaron.
Dicen de el que es el winckelmann alemn. Pero de hecho, quatremere fue el
primer historiador del arte y clasisista de su generacin. N hay muchas
traducciones ni estudios de su obra e ingles.

Quatremere nos muestra no una imitacin simiesca del neoclasicismo de

winckelmann, sino que una sobreposicion de dos disciplinas despus de
winckelmann. En mi opinin, quatremere se formo en tres desarrollos cruciales
que winckelmann no: la revolucin francesa y su caotica consecuencia; la
influencia cultura academica combinada de la esttica de hegel (o quizs
deberamos simplicarlo a los idealistas alemanes) , y el establecimiento de la
era del museo en europa.

Quatremre also remained committed both to his Roman Catholicism and to

the secular values of the early Revolution; this was not easily done, and in this
he is very different than Winckelmann, who converted to Catholicism just
before moving to Rome, and who was, according to many who claimed to
understand him best, really a closeted pagan if he possessed any significant
religious sensibilities at all.14 Art and beauty were Winckelmanns primary
religious categories. Quatremre, by contrast, wrote eloquently and with deep
insight concerning his understanding of the compatibilities between the
Classical and Christian vision, an issue that does not really figure in
Winckelmanns more intentionally profane musings. I hope to show that
Quatremres true importance emerges only if we situate him in his own times,
one generation after Winckelmann, in a very different, a far more revolutionary,
and a far more religiously complex cultural moment.

Quatremre first announced himself as the emphatic opponent of art-historical

looting in Rome, and an opponent to the forthcoming expansion of the Muse
Napolon, in his celebrated Letters to Miranda; yet later he announced his deep
appreciation for the results of some similar-seeming British spoliation in
Greece, and he became an enthusiastic proponent of the new form taken by
the British Museum in London.

The juxtaposition of the two books in this way also suggests that the central
irony of Quatremres career is that the young radical becomes a figure of the
ruling establishment in older age, but that would be a gross overstatement of
the case.26 What I think is lost in the perfectly understandable contemporary
concern for provenance, patria and repatriation, are the central religious
paradoxes that animated Winckelmanns antiquarianism as well as his
museums, inspiring a form of spirituality to which Quatremre may be viewed
as an especially eloquent and important apostolic heir. One might go still
further: the decision by the Getty Foundation to publish these two books
together may speak as well to its own concerns with the contemporary
pressing of repatriation claims worldwide, claims to which the Getty Museum
has been singularly susceptible, and nowhere more so than in Italy.27 The new
Director of the Getty Museum, James Cuno,

has been an impassioned critic of the new nationalism that he sees lying at the
heart of most such repatriation claims,28 hence the publication of material
from the heyday of imperial looting that nonetheless paints a more complicated
picture of the matter seems both timely and relevant. While I find many of
Cunos arguments compellingand it is certainly the case that modern
archaeology was at least as implicated in modern nationalisms as modern art
museums wereI suspect that the availability of this new text to an English-
speaking audience already consumed by the ethical and political dimension of
repatriation questions may actually distract us from the broader range of
Quatremres interests and the profound religious speculations that
characterized so much of his work. The religious implications of modern
museums and their profane forms of display were much clearer in his day
than in ours, since the twinned revolutions embodied in Winckelmanns
Neoclassicism and the museums spawned by that new aesthetic vision were
relatively new and not yet fully justified in the popular mind.

While Quatremre was comfortable with the reigning idea that the Patrie is a
new divinity for a free people, and that this new religion was political, moral
and universal, he was generally opposed to the destruction of Christian
monuments to make room for the thing; he preferred that they be carefully
removed to another location. Already at age 40, then, he insisted on the
essential compatibility between the new civic religion of the Revolutionary
Republic and the traditional Christian edifice he had been commissioned to
adapt to its new secular purpose.34 In 1791, Quatremre entered into the
furious debates about the future of the system of state patronage embodied in
institutions like the Louvre Salons and the French Academies in Paris and in
Rome. Splitting the difference between more radical colleagues, like David, who
argued for the wholesale dismantling of the current institutions, and the voices
of aristocratic privilege, which essentially sought to defend and maintain the
old regime, he published his Con siderations on the Arts of Design in
France.35 His central premise throughout this period was striking; namely,
that the artistic freedom to exhibit was morally equivalent to the freedom of
the press: Equal rights, which is the foundation of the Constitution, allows all
citizens to express their thoughts; this legal equality ought to allow all artists to
exhibit their works. Their paintings are their thoughts (son tableau, cest sa
pense), and their public exhibition is the equivalent of their right to publish.
The Louvre Salon is the press for painting, so long as decency and public order
are respected.36

He had already given an important public address to the Assembly on 2 April

1790 in defense of the necessary freedom of the Parisian theaters,37 and he
returned to this question of fidelity to the sacred principles of the Revolution
and the Rights of Man in his 1796 Letters to Miranda. You know that the arts
and sciences have long formed a republic in Europe whose members are bound
to each other by mutual love and the quest for truth and beauty; this is their
social pact and rather than isolating themselves from their own nations they
tend to conciliate such national interests from the invaluable perspective of
universal brotherhood. . . . The dissemination of enlightenment has rendered
Europe a great service; no nation can any longer suffer the humiliation of being
denominated barbaric by another; instead, across all these countries there is a
community of instruction and erudition and an equality of taste, knowledge and
industry. . . . it is as a member of the general republic of the arts and sciences
and not as an inhabitant of this or that nation that I will discuss the interest
that all parties share in the conservation of everything.38

Such aesthetic culture (and the moral cultivation it requires) is, Quatremre
insists, a European achievement and a universal human legacy, hence the
importance of universal standards of justice as embodied in international law
and the so-called Rights of Man. Rome was the singular capital of that republic
of letters, as it had been already for Montaigne centuries earlier, when he
praised Rome as the mos cosmopolitan city on earth. This claim inspired
Quatremre to one of his more rousing, and apocalyptic conclusions: See Rome
stripped completely bare in this way, her ancient ruins buried under modern
debris, and then witness Europe descending again into the dark night of bad
taste and barbarism, covered anew in a veil of error and ignorance!39 The
moral and spiritual matters implicated in the culture of the modern museum, as
well as the political question of what belongs where, will never be far from
Quatremres subsequent meditations. Aptly conceived as a mouseion, a
shrine to the Muse, museums were designed to move and to inspireand so
they did. The British Museum provided Quatremre with his first week-long
experience of work produced, he believed, by Pheidiass own hand, worked
linked now to his own. For there can be no doubt. We touch, we gaze upon, the
marbles that Pericles and Plato saw, possibly worked by the chisel of
Agarocrites or Alcamenes, and quite possibly retouched by Pheidias himself.
These are the remains of one of the most celebrated temples of antiquity, built
in Athenss most beautiful century, constituting one of the true masterpieces of
art. These remains are graced with a beauty that blooms ever new and that,
according to Plutarch, seemed to grow younger with the passing years. Hence
the special value attaching to the spectacle of these works derives from a
multitude of feelings and accessory considerations such as no other collection
of antiquities can inspire.40 Such a reaction caused many sensitive readers to
question the consistency of such encomia with his earlier concerns about
French spoliation. With these few wordsand with this reminder concerning the
many treasures held in the British Museum about which I have said nothing
my sole purpose is to let you know what I think and what indeed anyone is
bound to think of this collection. So let me tell you that, containing as it does
the largest number of original pieces of sculpture from the most beautiful
period in Greece, it must now stand at the forefront of all collections: the one to
which science and art history will turn for classical models and the most
authentic ancient materials.41 It is as if this new London Museum (and by
possible implication, the Parisian Museum in which he had worked for so long),
had succeeded in capturing and extending the sacred spirit of the museum, the
spirit that had been born in Rome under the star of Winckelmann: Modern
Rome had never ceased to produce zealous antiquarians . . . Pope Benedict xiv,
in the grand collection of antiquities on the Capitoline, had prepared the way to
which the modern arts would, sooner or later, return. But these arts had begun
to need further nourishment. It was left to Winckelmann to provide the final
impulse toward the renewal of ancient taste in his History of Art, composed at
roughly the same time, and with access to, the materials assembled in the Villa
Albani, conceived by the Cardinal of that name. Thus Rome was to erect in
honor of ancient art, a new monument that would exert a singular influence. In
1773, Pope Clement xiv established at the Vatican and began to erect a
magnificent Museum, destined to collect in one place the dispersed examples
of ancient sculpture . . . .42 Central to what Quatremre came to appreciate
quite independently of the important political questions of spoliation and the
practical questions of proper restitutionwas the manner in which museums
served as a bulwark to save the culture of humanity from the inevitable losses
due to the vagaries of flux and change. In his reflections on Raphael, he
concluded with words that take on a particular resonance in the museum-city
with which he first fell in love (Rome), and the Museum that first stole his heart
(in the Apostolic Palace), enabling him to gaze at his leisure at the
transformative spiritual vision of that great Renaissance master with its subtle
play of color and form, aimed at rejuvenating religious insight.

Empires and museums follow one another. Such effusive words in praise of the
Vatican and British Museums stand in the very sharpest contrast to the polemic
he issued against the emerging museum culture of Paris in a series of lectures
at the Academy in 1807, lectures he later published in 1815. This text, Moral
Considerations on the Destination of Works of Art, is surely his most
passionately argued book, and in some ways it is his most eloquent. He
appears to have come to the conclusion that the emerging museum culture in
loot-laden Paris was stultifying to the promotion of a more vibrant culture of
visual arts.

One is convinced that the secret to making the arts flourish consists in the
virtue of those vast assemblages of works of art one calls Collections, Cabinets,
or Museum. All the nations are currently consumed with competitive envy
about them. But here is the remarkable thing: the distinction between
masterworks and models is blurred here . . . and no museum ever made an
artist. . . . Does one not see that Constantinople came into possession of the
collections from the Palace of Lausus and the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus,
without these beautiful examples of Greek works inspiring the birth of a single
Byzantine artist? Did ancient Rome not have in succession the Porticoes of
Octavian, the galleries of the Golden House and the Temple of Peace? And yet
history has not preserved the name of a single Roman sculptor.44 The reasons
for such artistic sterility are not far to find. In a word, works of art displayed in
museums have been removed from their original contexts. Quatremre
juxtaposed the words displacement and dismemberment to great effect
already in his Letters to Miranda. The moral urgency of that connection is
intensified when the context in question was essentially a religious one by
design.

How many monuments are now stripped of virtue due to their displacement!
How many works have lost their real value in losing their use! How many
objects are viewed with indifference because they no longer interest the
curious onlooker! These are the currencies no longer valued but by savants.
Thus, every day we see them condemned to the tribute of barren admiration,
all these scattered and mutilated fragments of antiquitythese gods without
altars, these altars without worshipers, these symbols of honor now devoid of
all meaning, these fragments deprived of motive, these sarcophagi emptied of
affection which may attract antiquarian erudition but before which the soul
seeks in vain for any emotional response. They are simply too far removed
from their original home.45 Quatremre was as aware as anyone of the sea-
change in visual perception enacted by Winckelmann. He knew that most of the
statues both men admired served originally as the visual inspiration for
religious veneration; he knew that most had been housed originally in temples
of equal aesthetic precocity. He understood that the massive shift in ways of
seeing such objectsthe shift in religious rhetoric from pagan idol to fine
arthad served to justify these objects display at the Vatican Museum and
elsewhere. But he also understood, through hard experience, what the
excesses of a secularizing vision had done in the field of the visual arts. And so
Quatremre once again wishes to split the difference, to encourage a way of
looking at Greek statues that permits them to be both religious images and fine
art. It is a spiritually subtle form of seeing that he wishes to promote. This new
way of looking at ancient art possessed the added virtue of reminding
Quatremres audience of the deep insight those ancient authors who gazed at
these statues before us, and in this way, were capable of communicating.
Quatremres single most influential and important ancient sculptor was
Pheidias; the single statue that attracted the greatest admiration and critical
reflection was his chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia. The book that
Quatremre published on that statue in 1815, Le Jupiter Olympien, was
arguably his most influential publication in his own lifetime; it earned him the
honorary position of Perpetual Secretary at the Academy and quickly became
the standard work on Greek polychrome. Quatremre quotes Quintilians
famous summary of this statues importance in several of his more theoretical
works: Pheidias is thought to be better at representing gods than men [tamen
dis quam hominibus effingendis melior artifex creditur]. In ivory [ebore] he
would be unrivaled even if he had created nothing more than the Athena in
Athens and the Zeus at Olympia in Elis, the beauty of which is said to have
added something to the traditional religion [receptae religioni], so perfectly
does the majesty of the work equal the majesty of the god [adeo maiestas
operis deum aequavit].46 This is a remarkable passage in every way. It is
noteworthy that Quatremre so often turned to later Roman reflections on
Greek art; we may not know the names of any Roman or Byzantine artists, but
we are well familiar with the most significant Roman writers who demonstrated
such an encyclopedic knowledge of the religious art and architecture of the
ancient Greek world: Cicero, Pausanias, Pliny, Quintilian, Strabo, and the like.
Perhaps he felt that this kind of criticism was the very best that a properly self-
conscious and religiously attuned museum culture can produce. For Quintilians
contention is remarkable in every way, virtually turning upside-down a more
commonly held understanding of the relationship between religion and the
visual arts. This work of art had actually added something to the received
Olympian religion of the Greeks, Quintillian suggests. The visual arts were not
thought to be slavishly in the service of religious orthodoxy; they were dynamic
contributors to the ongoing work of spiritual vision. This is an insight with which
Quatremre was very much in accord in relation to both the ancient and the
modern arts. While his somewhat dated name for this virtue was genius,
Quatremres fundamental belief about idealizing art was that it hinged on the
inner visin of the artist. If Pheidias actually added something to Greek religion,
then Raphael and Michelangelo, and Canova for that matter, had added
something to modern religion as well. This is why it is so wrong-headed to
consent to the simplistic view that Quatremre was, or became,
conservative. He was consistent in his belief that a central role of the fine
arts was to supplement inherited forms with visual novelty and inherited
knowledge with new vision. The central contention of Le Jupiter Olympien was
that there existed an important elective affinity between the religion and the
visual arts of the classical Greeks. A profoundly incarnational and
anthropomorphic religious system was destined to create the very supplest
forms of visual iconography. Greek religion, in its pre-Christian and Christian
forms, was precisely such a thing: The nature and the spirit of Greek religion,
which had given rise to these sorts of images of the Divine, were singularly
favorable to their execution and use. In effect, nothing other than this kind of
religion, in which the senses were called upon to foster and promote belief,
could create so great a claritywith this mingling of the grandiose dimension
of these divine figures, the magnificence and beauty of their materials and
their execution, and the imitative perfection of the form. No other type of
sculpture could have combined all of these qualities, and no other could have
imposed itself so strikingly upon the imagination. The unity of monochrome
material, whether of marble or bronze, never provided art with the capacity to
captivate the senses to the same degree, nor to charm the eye, as did the
spectacle provided by these prodigious ornaments to the thrones upon which
these gods of gold and ivory reigned supreme.47 He would return to this point
in his two forays into theoretical aesthetics. Here was the first formulation, from
1823: It was especially a consequence of that polytheist religion, which, after
having employed signs in a similar sense of relation to that of letters with
words, contributed to clothe its emblems with a character fitted to convert
them into purely corporeal images, and This novel influence of religion on the
arts, due no doubt to the revolution they themselves had contributed to bring
about, produced a reciprocal influence on the part of religion over the arts.
Instead of being, as in other instances its slaves, they became its minsters and
interpreters. In fact, every Grecian divinity, with its poetical forms and
mythological attributes, became a compound of abstract ideas and general
properties, which art was insufficient to render visible to the eye, and
intelligible to the mind, without the intervention of an ideal or generalized style
of imitation.48

And here was his final formulation, from 1837: The religion of the Greeks was
the principle, the engine and the propagator of the ideal style in imitation, and
it would appear that the duration of this style, considered at its highpoint, was
dependent upon and coterminous with this religion.49 Thus, he argues, it is a
failure of nearly categorical proportion to object to the use of pagan form in the
visual arts in the Christian era. Quatremre refers to this question, or rather
this moral concern, rather strikingly, as a bourgeois objection: We continue
to appropriate all sorts of ancient images without concern, images belonging to
their paganism, and to a system of belief long-since vanished. It is an
anachronism, in the same way that a cuirass or a lance or a shield is, andso
they saylikely to mislead posterity as to our own customs and beliefs.50 He
responds to this alleged religious concern in a fascinating way, by
supplementing a sculptural practice with a poetic one: They [those who voiced
the complaint] continue to invoke Apollo and the Muses; they use the same
Parnassus and the same Olympia as the Greeks, without suffering the illusion
that such uses of a foreign faith will throw future generations into confusion.51
In short, the moderns have been clothing themselves in classical costumes,
phrasings and myths for a very long time; doing so has inspired some of the
greatest artistic achieve ments of the Neoclassical era. Such a system of
creative adaptation requires a tremendous exercise in creative imagination
applied with spirit and passion to the Olympic pantheon especially (296297)
and as such it joined the various epochs of Homer, Pericles and Alexander in a
single, overarching, idealizing aesthetic vision. This was the religion of Greek
antiquity, what Hegel famously called the religion of beauty in his Lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion.52 Religion, and more specifically the Roman
religion (by which I, following Quatremre, intend in both its polytheistic and its
later institutional Christian forms), lay at the heart of what amounted to a sea-
change in European culture and politics. Moreover, the two decisive shifts in
religious seeing that I have been trackingmaking a larger place for Greek
religion in the modern museum, while limiting the political place of the
Christian religion in the modern state were ever more subtly linked in the
post-Revolutionary European and North American world order. To set the
complex contours of this decisive shift in somewhat higher relief, it is necessary
to see Winckelmann as the essential Roman precursor to Quatremres work in
Paris. Throughout Quatremres published writings, we witness the
simultaneous acknowledgment of a massive debt to Winckelmanns inspired
cultural

contributions, coupled with subtler indications of where and how Quatremre

wishes to extend, refine, or correct the insights of his remarkably creative
predecessor. This too had something to do with the Revolutions continued
rethinking of the devilishly difficult question of modern religion.

Quatremres probing reflections on such religious questions are an especially

representative way of illustrating what the study of ancient art had become just
one generation after Johann Joachim Winckelmanns (17171768) pioneering
efforts in the field of Art History, an emphatically historicist type of study
informed by new and ongoing archaeological discoveries in Italy53 and
elsewhere. As I noted at the outset, two things that most emphatically separate
the generation of Winckelmann from the generation of Quatremre were: first,
the emergence of several preeminent and entirely public classical art museums
in Rome (at the Capitoline in 1734 and at the Vatican in 17571767), along with
the subsequent dissemination of a new kind of aesthetic culture throughout the
major capitals of Europe; and second, the French Revolution, with its far more
convulsive and uneven dissemination of constitutional reforms throughout
Europe and her colonial holdings. Of these two phenomena, the museums were
every bit as revolutionary as the Revolution, though the radicality of
Winckelmanns cultural achievement has been less well remarked in recent
years. Since, as we have seen, the displacement (dplacement) of art
historical treasures was a major preoccupation in a number of Quatremres
published writings, the displacement of Rome as the commonly
acknowledged capital of the world of fine arts is an ironic historical subtext to
the entire course of his career. Displaced first by Paris, and then by London,
Rome is the forgotten origin of the very institutionmodern classical art
museums on which most Neoclassicism relied. It would be easy to read
Quatremres career as primarily political one, or at least to read it in primarily
political terms. State sponsorship of the arts was an unambiguous good, in his
judgment, but much depended on what kind of state, and what kind of art such
a state sought to promote. He was decidedly the product of the new
international culture of the public art museum in Europe, an Early Modern
institution that grew out of state sponsorship by a religious institution (the
Vatican), the precise alliance that the French Revolution had endeavored to
abrogate. These institutions had placed certain fundamentally religious ideas
like incarnation, image and imitationeloquently on display. Less a political
figure than a product of Neoclassical culture in the new era of the European
museum, Quatremre provides us with a fascinating example of what
classicists and art historians who take museums and religions with equal
seriousness can produce.

Quatremres career beautifully illustrates what the field was to become in the
first generation that witnessed the simultaneous emergence of the modern
public art museum, institutional and state-sponsored modern archaeology, and
the concomitant interest in cross-cultural display they often promoted . . . all of
this, in an age of self-styled political and religious revolution. Debates about the
scope, the scale and the cultural or political purpose of such museums were a
major issue in Quatremres early writings, and provide one important
explanation for the extent of his early reputation. Further meditations on a
number of European museumsin London, Paris, and Munich, as well as Rome
constituted one of the most recurrent themes in his work and signaled some
significant shifts in his later thought, his own demurrals notwithstanding.
Quatremres was a revolutionary era, as Winckelmanns was not (though
Winckelmann, a deep admirer of Voltaire, may well have sensed some of what
was coming). Revolutionary turmoil, imperial reaction, and aggressive
secularism created the historical context in which Quatremre was to extend
the range and the scope of Winckelmanns ideasenhancing them,
contradicting them, and supplementing them with new archaeological evidence
unavailable to his muchadmired predecessor. Arguably the greatest single point
of divergence between the two men concerned religion, in my judgment.
Quatremre is one of those fascinating figures for whom taking the religiosity
of Greek art and Greek culture seriously did not threaten his own theological
scruples. He saw no necessary contradiction between his Neoclassical and his
Christian commitments, elusive as they can seem at times. We may read
Quatremre as a remarkably creative Christian classicist and art historian. He
was, in any case, decidedly not the surprising neo-pagan figure some of
Winckelmanns greatest admirers took him to be (though some scholars have
suggested that Quatremre may have flirted with this pose briefly in the
waning years of the Napoleonic regime). The modern museum was a self-styled
temple, to be sure a modern shrine dedicated to an ancient Musebut it was
just as decidedly not a church. Quatremre appears to have inhabited the
liminal space between them quite happily, intending to connect these two
modern institutions in times of rapid change, while at the same time
maintaining their separation. Andthis was the keywhat linked these two
western religious systems most emphatically, to his mind, was their frankly
incarnational orientation, an orientation that inspired the creation of art forms
notable most of all for what the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova referred to
as their meatiness (this phrase appears in an enthused letter he wrote to
Quatremre after his first glimpse of the Elgin Marbles in London; he was
playing on the essential carne lying at the core of every incarnation).

It is also important to recall that Quatremre lived in Paris, not in Rome. His
Roman sojourns, as influential as they were on his early scholarly formation,
were simply an especially productive version of a fairly traditional Grand Tour;
he was never tempted to trade his homeland for a more permanent Roman
residence as Winckelmann had done. Moreover, in the course of Quatremres
own lifetime, the art-historical center of gravity was shiftingaway from Rome,
toward Paris and London. This may be one reason why we remember the
Louvre and the British Museum, and not the Vatican Museum, as the founding
institutions that they decidedly were not. Winckelmann and Quatremre
suffered from no such confusion; they knew that the Vatican had sponsored
and staged the grand idea, the novel institutions, and the new classical taste
they were designed to promote. Winckelmann had played a largely unsung role
in the creation of this burgeoning Roman museum culture; Quatremre was
among the most eloquent and productive of his early beneficiaries. But
Quatremre was also living in a new era, in a new cultural capital, with a new
museum that boasted enormously significant new classical treasures that had
been discovered after Winckelmanns untimely deathlike the Venus de Milo.
This cultural transfer of Roman influence to Paris, the very displacement to
which Quatremre had objected so passion

ately in 1796, was something with which he appeared to have made his peace
in later years. It was, in any case, fast becoming a fait accompli. As Hegel
pointedly observed in his Lectures on World Historylectures he offered four
times in the mid-to-late 1820s, as Quatremre was completing some of his
most important and influential worksspirit moves west, following the suns
course across the sacred ground below. Quatremre appears to have come to a
similar view, whether he knew Hegels work in any detail or not. Athens had
ceased to be a western city a very long time ago, in his judgment. Rome had
displaced her, achieving a preeminence, not to say a permanencein both
classical and Christian termsthat Athens never managed to secure. But now,
ever restless, revolutionary spirit was on the move again: Paris and London
were the new cultural capitals of a Neoclassical aesthetic regime, each
boasting hugely important new museum collections. The simultaneous
emergence of modern archaeology, conducted by the European powers almost
exclusively under the aegis of the new imperial order, ensured a continual flow
of new material into these same museums. It was precisely this constellation of
interrelated phenomena (the neoclassicism, the imperialism, the museums)
that eventually made Quatremres workfor all of its importance, remarkable
insights and impressive scopeseem obsolete. He died in Paris in 1849, hard
on the heels of yet another revolutionary year in Europe. It is worth recalling
what happened in the art world in that very city, a mere twenty-five years
layer. In short, the Neoclassical regimeand the central role that naturalism,
idealism and imitation played within this aesthetic vision was rejected almost
completely, and in remarkably short order. Paris had landed upon a new self-
conception, one that placed pride of place on continual innovation, a somewhat
self-congratulatory modernness, and the genius born of revolutionary new
ideas. If Egyptian art was rejected as static and unchanging, then modern art
was to escape that charge with its emphatic impulse toward continual visual
innovation. The new source of creative artistic engagement was the inner world
of the individual artist, not Greek or Roman statues, and the new artistic
challenge was not to imitate, but to create afresh. This, by the way, was what
Quatremre took to be the centerpiece of Michelangelos genius; he was the
first truly modern artist and modern man, one who fully comprehended the
novelty of his social role; he was painting, in a very real sense, for himself. The
career of these two men took a very different course and manifested a very
different character. That of Raphael offers us the image of a river flowing gently
along its way across a vast plain, with a large number of tributaries that
increase it and accelerate it along its course without interruption. The history of
Michelangelo suggests the idea of an enormous body of water surging over
uneven territory, accelerating sometimes in rapid torrents, retarded at other
times by great boulders, eventually overcoming all obstacles and reaching the
sea, but only after having changed its name several times. (7475)56 The artist
as force of nature, as titanic rebel . . . and as singular source of spiritual
enlightenment: this had been Pheidias, this had been Michelangelo, and this
was Canova. They were primarily to be seen as bestowers of aesthetic
epiphany. The new artistic movements announced in and around the Parisian
Salons in the decades subsequent to Quatremres death reveal the lineaments
of this story quite well. Signs of what was coming appeared as early as 1863,
when the emperor Louis-Napoleon proposed the creation of a Salon des refuss
in order to display work rejected by the somewhat restrictive judgments of that
years jury57; Manets Olympia first met her initially unsympathetic public
there.58 Thus did the traditional system of Academy and Salon give rise to an
anti-academic anti-Salon;59 so too did the Neoclassical aesthetics of idealized
imitation give rise to a radically new, non-mimetic aesthetics. Impressionism,
Fauvism, Cubism,

Abstraction, Surrealism60 and all the rest signaled what amounted to the
conclusive break with Winckelmanns and Quatremres aesthetics, not to
mention the privileged position once occupied by Greek sculpture and idealistic
imitation in the fine arts. In a word, what stands between Quatremres life and
works and those of us who endeavor to read it today is the disruptive and
discontinuous history of Modern Art in the twentieth century. We see this
perhaps most clearly enunciated in that great manifesto of abstraction, Wassily
Kandinskys Concerning the Spiritual In Art (1911). Imitation, he proclaims at
the outset, intending to provoke, is a practice best suited to children and to
monkeys. Every work of art is the child of its age, and, in many cases, the
mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of
its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the
past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live
and feel, as did the ancient Greeks. Such imitation is mere aping. Externally the
monkey completely resembles a human being; he will sit holding a book in
front of his nose, and turn over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his
actions have for him no real meaning.61 Greek art cannot serve as a model for
modern times, so different have we become. A more stinging indictment of the
entire project of Neoclassicism and what was now taken to be an aesthetics of
slavish imitation would be hard to imagine. In Kandinskys work after 1910, the
active notion of composition would come to replace any sense of static
imitation.62 Indeed, this same word would serve as the title for a great many of
his most important transitional paintings. In his view, the era of Winckelmann,
and of Quatremre, was decidedly over. Revolutions may be permitted a
certain amount of overheated rhetoric, but this blanket dismissal of
Neoclassicism in the name of Abstraction clearly misses what was best in both
mens work. It is worth recalling that the way both 160 classics at the dawn of
the museum era Winckelmann and Quatremre imagined the difficult art of
imitation was neither childish nor apish at all. The two valued, not praised,
individual artistic creativity at least as much as Kandinsky didas idealism.
Theirs was rather a quasi-Nietzschean call to agonistic imitation, a form of
imitation aiming at surpassing the ancients with contemporary achievements,
much as Rome did with Greece and the Greek arts. In short, the ancients
provide us with idealizing models to be surpassed. Quatremre was even more
emphatic about this than Winckelmann had been; he was the product of a
revolutionary era, after all. Citing his favorite Roman sources, like Cicero, Pliny
and Quintilian, he made much of the artistic paradox that a copy may in the
best case actually surpass an original. It was never a matter simply of
submitting to ancient superlatives, still less of clothing modern art in classical
dress. Far more was at stake in these aesthetic commitments than that. In fact,
Quatremres mature aesthetic theories hinged on the unbridgeable distance
between the model and the idealizing representation which surpasses it. I
reduce this fundamental principle to its simplest expression in the following
terms: To imitate in the fine arts, is to produce the resemblance of a thing but
in some other thing which becomes the image of it.63 An image, in this
technical sense, is not the sort of thing of which a child or a monkey would ever
be capable. The radical spirit that animated this aesthetic theory has been
beautifully captured in literary form by Roberto Calasso, in an evocative
encomium to the vanished mythopoetic sensibilities of the ancient world, The
Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

To betray Hera, Zeus chose one of her priestesses, the human being closest to
her, since it was she who held the keys to the shrine. Her name was Io. In looks
and dress it was Ios duty to re-create the image of the goddess she served.
She was a copy endeavoring to imitate a statue. But Zeus chose the copy; he
wanted that minimal difference which is enough to overturn order and generate
the new, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. 161 generate meaning. And he wanted it
because it was a difference and her because she was a copy.64 There is a lot
more to this than the so-called narcissism of small differences. There is a world
view herethere is passionate commitment, hunger, desire, inspiration, even
grief. There is, in short, a religiosity to this core conception of imagestheir
origins, means, and ends. Quatremre always accepted as given the ancient
assessment of Pheidias as the supreme exemplar of idealizing classical
sculpture. He also accepted without hesitation the ancient consensus that
Pheidiass monumental gold and ivory statue of Zeus at Olympia was the
supreme artistic achievement of the ancient world. The statue, we will recall,
was said actually to have added something to the traditional, received religion,
in Quintilians noteworthy judgment. Quatremre took such claims with great
seriousness; he believed that Raphael and Michelangelo had accomplished
something similar in the remarkable world of Renaissance Christianity, as had
Canova in his own day. Teasing out the subtle logic of this view, a surprising
conclusion appears on the classical horizon. Pheidias created an image, a sort
of copy of an Olympian original, the great god Zeus. But his copy was in some
way preferable to the original; his intended Greek audience wanted that copy,
wanted it perhaps because it was a copy. Quatremre understood himself to
be, historically speaking, in continuity with that Greek audience, and he took
these mingled aesthetic and spiritual desires with great seriousness. Only a
religion that attends to images, bodies, incarnation and desire with equal
attentiveness can make sense of such things, as he had argued vigorously and
repeatedly. At their best, both the Olympian and the Christian religions were
such. They were both emphatically Greek religions, after all, mediated by Rome
andRevolution or notheir sun had not yet set. This was the revelation that
Winckelmanns Profane Museum had paradoxically been designed to
enhance: an image of the classical past as a living history, not a 162 classics at
the dawn of the museum era dead one; and an image of classical religious
images not as something surpassed or rendered mute by the Christian church,
as icons, but rather as domesticated and placed on proud display in the very
bosom of that same church, as revelatory images of fine art. Quatremre was,
in this sense, one of the primary European apostles for Winckelmanns
Neoclassical, museum-goers gospel. Perhaps the publication of a new English
translation of Quatremres most important epistles will contribute to the noble
work of twenty-first century antiquarians who attempt, however haltingly, to
keep their faith intact.