Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

This, in so far as it could be categorised, came closer to the antiquarian category of
‘curiosity’ than to art. By the very act of displaying in a museum the funerary monuments and
architectural fragments he had ‘rescued’, along with reliquaries, busts, plaster casts and pieces of
armour, Lenoir was redefining them, creating a new context, both physical and cultural, for
objects, which, however aesthetically conceived, had never been designed to be viewed as
discrete works of art. Lenoir has been a controversial figure, ever since the Revolution, both a
hero and a villain. 32 A great deal has been written about the Musée both in the context of the
Revolution and as part of the history of public museums. 33 Francis Haskell, whose discussion of
Lenoir in History and its Images comes closest to my concerns and gives a full and nuanced
account of reactions to the Museum, nevertheless perpetuates the idea that between Lenoir’s
interest in history and his attempt to create an atmospheric sequence of rooms calculated to
appeal to the visitor’s sensibility, there lay a contradiction. Lenoir, Haskell says, ‘did all he could
to encourage a historical, and not merely an artistic, approach to the monuments in his charge by
sprinkling his catalogue entries with biographical anecdotes and summaries of colourful
episodes’. 34 Yet Lenoir, like so many of the antiquaries of his generation, saw the historical and
the artistic, the aesthetic and the factual, as mutually reinforcing.
He presented himself, naturally enough, as a hero defying the revolutionary vandals and
to some extent he was. He lost a finger preventing the demolition of the tomb of Cardinal
Richelieu [fig: 24]. Others nevertheless accused him of vandalism himself, of acquiring objects
for the Musée that were not in any (other) way threatened. In the context of antiquarianism,
however, for good or ill, Lenoir is a pivotal figure. His reclassification of the objects he acquired
was initially largely pragmatic, indeed redefinition was as vital to their survival during the
Revolution as the preservation of their physical integrity. The royal tombs from St Denis
represented monarchy and Christianity, both of which were at that time illegal. Lenoir’s
presentation of them as works of art moved them back into the category of the permissible. The
32
Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument pp.67-69 and Poulot, Dominique, ‘Alexandre Lenoir et les
museés des monuments français’.
33
Notably: Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir; Poulot, ‘Alexandre Lenoir et les museés des monuments français’;
Haskell, History and it Images, pp.236-252.
34
Haskell, History and it Images, p.250.
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