Ornament of the Academy
Academician Marc Fumaroli, president of the Amis du Louvre, is a distinguished scholar and essayist, whose writings on 17th-century art reveal a profound knowledge of its cultural context, writes Robert Oresko.
Robert Oresko, Monday, 25th August 2008
On 2 March 1995 Marc Fumaroli was elected to the sixth fauteuil of the Académie Française in succession to the playwright Eugène Ionesco. There could have been few more appropriate choices for the Académie’s task of preserving the purity of the French language than the Professor of Rhetoric and Society in Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries at the Collège de France; he is now emeritus professor at the Collège, as well as a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. One possible reason for the lucid and elegant quality of Fumaroli’s French, both written and spoken, is his family background. Although born in Marseille in 1932, he spent many of his formative years in Fez, where his father was an administrator in the French protectorate of Morocco. His command of a highly distinctive and refined French style, protected from Parisian slang and jargon, evolved outside metropolitan France and was possibly the purer as a result.
Fumaroli’s early major publication, the massive L’âge de l’éloquence, appeared in 1980. By studying printed tracts and theses, Fumaroli positioned the study of early-modern rhetoric in a key place in literary and cultural history, and this now classic work has gone through several editions. Lâge de l’éloquence was followed in 1990 by a collection of essays grouped around the great French playwright Pierre Corneille, Héros et orateurs. These two books established Fumaroli as a master of 17th-century cultural studies.
Well before 1980, however, Fumaroli had indicated the wide range of his interests with a sequence of trenchant and penetrating articles about Parisian theatre, including interviews with Fernando Arrabal and Peter Brook and analyses of Ludvig Holberg and Sacha Guitry.1 By the 1980s, he had begun to write on figurative art, most notably, in 1989, L’ inspiration du poète de Poussin. Essai sur l’allégorie du Parnasse, a short book published to coincide with the opening of the new Louvre and dedicated to Jean-Pierre Cuzin, for many years chief curator of European paintings there.2 To his work on 17th-century painting Fumaroli brought his profound knowledge of and sensibility to pre-revolutionary culture. First recorded in the 1653 inventory of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, and having passed through collections in France – from where Friedrich II of Prussia was encouraged to purchase it in 1768 – and England, The Inspiration of the Poet (Fig. 1) was acquired by the Louvre in 1911. In 1996, Fumaroli was elected president of the Amis du Louvre. Founded in 1898, it is the oldest body of its kind in the world, and its 70,000 members annually contribute some €3m for acquisitions.
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