Details

Subject(s)

• Painting—Conservation and restoration—France—Paris—History—18th century [Browse]
• Painting—Conservation and restoration—France—Paris—History—19th century [Browse]

Issuing body

• Getty Conservation Institute [Browse]

Translator

• Grevet, Sharon [Browse]

Translation of

Étienne, Noémie. Restauration des peintures à Paris [Browse]

Summary note

The decades following the 1973 publication of Alessandro Conti s "Storia del Restauro" have seen considerable scholarly interest in the development of restoration in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. A number of technical treatises and biographies of restorers have offered insight into restoration practice. 'The Restoration of Paintings in Paris, 1750 1815', however, is the first book to situate this work within the broader historical and philosophical contexts of the time. Drawing on previously unpublished primary material from archives in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Venice, Noemie Etienne combines art history with anthropology and sociology to survey the waning decades of the Ancien Regime and early post Revolution France. Initial chapters present the diversity of restoration practice, encompassing not only royal institutions and the Louvre museum but also private art dealers, artists, and craftsmen, and examine questions of trade secrecy and the changing role of the restorer. Following chapters address the influence of restoration and exhibition on the aesthetic understanding of paintings as material objects. The book closes with a discussion of the institutional and political uses of restoration, along with an art historical consideration of such key concepts as authenticity, originality, and stability of artworks, emphasizing the multilayered dimension of paintings by such important artists as Titian and Raphael. There is also a useful dictionary of the main restorers active in France between 1750 and 1815. "

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• Introduction: restoration and the public sphere
• Versatility and flexibility
• A networked practice
• Between the institutional and the private settings
• A public sphere of knowledge?
• Standards and reclassifications
• Intellectual property
• A "connoisseur-artist"
• Toward a definition at the museum
• To smoke or to scour?
• Restoration as interpretation
• Faking the painting
• Window or mirror
• Supports/surfaces
• From divided work to fabricated painting
• From adjustable object to adjusted space
• Mural exodus: the paintings transported to the museum
• Commercial and private venues
• Seeing, believing, and judging
• Financial repercussions
• A political practice
• For the glory of the king
• After the revolution: the opening of the Louvre
• "From the rubble of triumph"
• Gazing upon the masterpieces of the arts
• The skilled hand of the French restorers
• The end of an empire.

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ISBN

• 9781606065167 ((pbk.))
• 1606065165 ((pbk.))

LCCN

2016030232

OCLC

954134254

Other standard number

• 12969533

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