Classics at the Dawn of the Museum Era: The Life and Times of Antoine Chrysostome Quatrem?re de Quincy (1755-1849)

Antoine Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy (1759-1849), arguably the foremost French classicist and art historian of the nineteenth century, is relatively little-known in English language scholarship. Three of his books were translated in the early nineteenth century, none in the twentieth century, and an important collection of two sets of open letters concerning museums, looting and repatriation was just published in 2012. Quatremère has been unfairly called 'the French Winckelmann,' a charge that sticks primarily because so little of his work has ever been translated. In fact, he shows us, not what apish imitation of Wincklemann's Neoclassicism looked like in the nineteenth century, but rather what these two overlapping disciplines had become in the generation after Winckelmann. Quatremère was formed by three crucial developments that Winckelmann did not and could not know: the French Revolution and its aftermath; Hegelian aesthetics; and the establishment of the museum era in Europe. Quatremère also remained committed to his Roman Catholicism and to the secular values of the early Revolution; 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 were anything at all. Quatremère wrote eloquently and with deep insight concerning his understanding of the compatibilities between the Classical and Christian vision, an issue that does not figure in Winckelmann's more intentionally 'profane' musings. Ruprecht hopes to show that Quatremère's true importance emerges only if we situate him in his own times, one generation after Winckelmann, in a very different, and a far more revolutionary and secularizing cultural moment.

"Museum Studies is coming into its own as a field of academic inquiry, and so it is a great pleasure to read Professor Ruprecht's latest contribution to the branch of intellectual and cultural history he has been making his own. Quatremere is fortunate in his most recent biographer: As always, Ruprecht writes with verve and elegance, demonstrating a erudite and subtle understanding of the way the arts of modern civilization — along with its manifold discontents - created not only the modern Museum, but also our conflicted attitudes towards the treasures it obtains, contains, and conserves." - Lori Anne Ferrell, Professor of Early Modern History and Literature, Claremont University, USA

Ruprecht hopes to show that Quatremere's true importance emerges only if we situate him in his own times, one generation after Winckelmann, in a very different, and a far more revolutionary and secularizing cultural moment.

Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. is William M. Suttles Chair of Religious Studies at Georgia State University, USA.

Preface
Preliminaries
A Rhetoric of Art and Religion or The Religion of Art
The Writings
Afterword
Appendix