Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens

Author(s) : QUATREMERE DE QUINCY Antoine-Chrysostôme
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Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens

Letters by Antoine Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) to Miranda [written 1796] and Canova [written 1818] on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome 

Introduction by Dominique Poulot
English translation by Chris Miller and David Gilks

Publisher’s presentation:

In the 1790s and early 1800s, the art world experienced two big events: First came the military confiscation of masterpieces from Italy and northern Europe in order to build a universal museum in Paris’s Louvre. Then famous marble sculptures were prised out of the Parthenon and sent to London. These events provoked reactions ranging from enthusiastic applause to enraged condemnation. The French art critic, architectural theoretician, and political conservative Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) was at the center of the European debates.

Quatremére de Quincy, the most famous art critic at the end of the Enlightenment, published two sets of letters about the role of museums. He first implored them to return works of art to their original settings but later argued in favor of the museum as a place where artworks can be safely stored and made available for artists to study.

In his pamphlet Letters to Miranda, he condemns the revolutionary hubris of putting “Rome in Paris” and urges the return of the works. In the Letters to Canova, however, Quatremère celebrates the British Museum for making the Parthenon sculptures accessible. 

Immensely contraversial and influential since they were written two centuries ago, Quatremére’s texts sum up the most bewildering moment of the debate on museums: did the new institution inaugurate the death of art, or bring it to its perfection?

This volume offers the first English translation of the letters, as well as an extensive introduction that reveals their content, the reason for their intellectual success, and how they enlarge contemporary disputes about cultural property, national claims and universal beauty.

Antoine Quatremère de Quincy was a French archaeologist, architectural theoretician, arts administrator, and influential writer. Dominique Poulot is professor of the history of art at the Université Paris 1 Panthèon-Sorbonne. Chris Miller is a translator specializing in the fine arts. David Gilks is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary College, University of London.

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Year of publication :
2012
Place and publisher :
Los Angeles, Getty Publications
Number of pages :
208
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