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
While Poussin would continue to play a critically important role in Fumaroli’s writing on the visual arts, the word ‘essai’ in the book’s title is vitally important. Fumaroli revived and refined the 18th-century concept of the essay, which had achieved a high point during the Second Empire and the first decades of the Third Republic in the hands of such masters of the French language as Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, famous for his Causeries du lundi and his brief Portraits, and the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, whose essays on 18th-century artists made a profound impact.3 It is significant that in 1982 Fumaroli wrote a preface to a new edition of the Goncourt brothers’s 1869 novel Madame Gervaisais, set in contemporary Rome. Fumaroli’s writings on the history of art take the form of extended essays, longer than much of the work of his 19th-century predecessors, more searching and profound and set in a far more rigorous and demanding scholarly structure.
Peinture et pouvoirs, published in 2007, is the second collection of Fumaroli’s essays to appear. As with L’école du silence, Fumaroli was able to return to previously published essays and to rethink and refresh them. In this, his publishing history resembles that of his friend Alvar González Palacios, the distinguished historian of furniture and the decorative arts, and a member of the Conseil d’Administration of the Amis du Louvre (see Apollo, March 2008).
Despite their origins as discrete and, at times, very long articles and introductions, the composite articles, converted into book chapters, of both L’école du silence and Peinture et pouvoirs make a strikingly coherent and consistent whole.3 The poles of Paris and Rome, the cross-fertilisation between the two cities, are a consistent theme. Among the prominent themes in the latter volume is the rivalry between Vouet and Poussin. Poussin was supported by Armand, Cardinal de Richelieu, and François Sublet de Noyers, the surintendant des bâtiments, to challenge the primacy of Vouet in the competition for commissions from the highest circles of patronage in Paris. Vouet had lived in Rome from 1613 to 1627, and a detail from his Allegory of Wealth (Musée du Louvre; Fig. 3), formerly in the collection of Louis XIII, was chosen as the cover illustration for Peinture et pouvoirs.
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