Sculpture and Enlightenment

by Erika Naginski

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892369591
Publisher:	Getty Publications
Publication date:	06/15/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	7.70(w) x 10.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Erika Naginski is Associate Professor of Architectural History at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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

Library Journal