European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762-1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power. Contributing fresh perspectives on the architecture, decorative arts, and visual culture of revolutionary France, this book explores how Percier and Fontaine’s desire to build structures of permanence and their inadvertent reliance upon temporary architectural forms shaped a new awareness of time, memory, and modern political identity in France.

This paper explores botany’s central position as a form of applied knowledge in Antoine Joubert de la Hiberderie’s Le Dessinateur d’étoffes d’or, d’argent, et de soie (1765). In his text, he advises aspiring designers of floral patterns (dessinateurs fleuristes) to study and acquire an intimate knowledge of flowers and their seven distinct parts: roots, stem, leaves, calyx, pistil, petals, and stamen. I consider the ways in which Joubert de la Hiberderie adopted and adapted the language of botany and plant taxonomy developed by Carl Linnaeus in Philosophia Botanica (1751), and how its reapplication to the realm of textile design transformed a scientific system of classification into manufactured forms of production. The paper will conclude by considering Joubert de la Hiberderie’s proposed publication on the analysis of flowers, and what this future botany devoted to “mental studies for designers of fabric” might have looked like.

This paper explores women’s mourning fashion accessories in France from 1789-1799 in order to investigate the ways in which the French Revolution transformed objects of personal bereavement into contested forms of collective memory. Although scholars of revolutionary fashion have studied the politically charged meanings of the virginal white chemises, bonnets rouges, and tricolor cockades that characterized dress in the turbulent final decade of the eighteenth century, comparatively little work has been done on female mourning accessories during the same period. Focusing on the veil, hairwork jewelry, and the fan, fashion objects that were crucial to the work of mourning in revolutionary France, this paper addresses the following questions: Was it possible to mourn victims of the guillotine without becoming politically suspect? And how were the material signs of loss registered around the neck, over the face, and on the finger reactivated as forms of royalist sedition in the wake of the Terror? Rather than analyze these objects in order to trace the evolution of stylistic trends, I draw upon Aby Warburg’s visual theory of the bewegtes Beiwerk, or the “accessory in motion,” in order to ask how fashion accessories acquired new meanings in crossing the temporal border of the French Revolution. In a context where sartorial practices were to pronounce public virtues instead of forms of self-expression, the fashion accessory became a small but animated carrier of meaning, a transitional object that negotiated collective traumas by giving shape to an internal economy of loss in the post-revolutionary period.

This paper examines a 1787 model for a serre-bijoux or jewel cabinet created for Marie Antoinette by the French architect-designer Jean-Démosthène Dugourc (1749-1825) and what this unfinished project might tell us about the high political, cultural, and aesthetic stakes of designing luxury objects for the royal court on the eve of the French Revolution. Located today at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the miniature model is comprised of wood, wax, and paper. These temporary materials were utilized by Dugourc to conjure a sense of the magnificence and splendor that ultimately went into the piece executed by the queen’s ébéniste Ferdinand Schwerdfeger, located today at Versailles. I compare the Baltimore model with the 1787 cabinet, which replaced an earlier one commissioned in 1770 by Louis XV to mark the political alliance of the Hapsburg princess’s marriage to the dauphin of France (later Louis XVI). The new jewel cabinet had considerable political significance since it was created in the wake of the Diamond Necklace Affair, a 1785 political scandal involving the queen, a cardinal, a prostitute, and a costly piece of diamond jewelry. Yet rather than view Dugourc’s unexecuted project solely in terms of Marie Antoinette’s fluctuating public reputation, I focus upon the furniture model as a starting point for thinking about how Dugourc’s mercurial design process itself responded to the changing and uncertain economic and political pressures of late ancien régime France. Extremely erudite yet never quite managing to hold onto a steady career in the royal administration, Dugourc gained early recognition as a talented draughtsman and designer of interiors, theater sets, silks, furniture, and ornament prints, working first for the Duc d’Orléans and later on for courts in Russia, Sweden, and Spain. Although he was named Dessinateur du Garde-Meuble de la Couronne in 1784, placing him in charge of provisioning the French court with costly furnishings such as the jewel cabinet, Dugourc never achieved the same level of visibility as his close collaborator and flamboyant brother-in-law, François-Joseph Bélanger. It was the ability to design behind the scenes that enabled Dugourc to survive the Revolution and to create objects with a sense of whimsical fantasy, even as the new French nation increasingly demanded a sense of sober Neoclassical proportion from its artists.

From petites maisons to hidden boudoirs, the architecture of privacy played a key role in the formation of the libertine imaginary in the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment writers, thinkers, and artists sought to define the modern self within the shifting boundaries of the private moment in its most intimate sexual dimensions and the prying eyes of the public sphere. In this paper I explore the inherent tensions between public and private space within narratives of libertinage through a decorative and discursive object that became of fundamental importance to the language of seduction: the lock and key. Architectural spaces have been studied as scenes of seduction and scholars have drawn attention to the integral importance of furniture in new understandings of privacy and the self in the eighteenth century. Yet little attention has been paid to Rococo designers’ sudden interest in serrurerie, forms of ironwork that included sophisticated locks, bolts, and keyholes. Often visually evocative of female anatomy, these ornamented mechanisms operated as the means through which elicit epistolary exchanges or moments of seduction were physically secured within and behind closed drawers and doors. The paper will explore eighteenth-century ornament books such as Pierre-Edmé Babel’s Livre de nouveau dessins, Serrurerie and the Rococo architect François Cuvilliés’s designs for locks in tandem with libertine works, in order to investigate how such texts depended upon the securing of borders, boundaries, and thresholds in order to achieve moments of absolute transgression.