Antoine Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) was an art critic, theorist and administrator who lived through some of the most interesting and dangerous times in modern Europe. His lifetime spanned Bourbon, Revolutionary, Republican, Napoleonic, Bourbon, Orlèan and again, just, Republican France. These times were interesting and dangerous for antiquities as well as people and it is de Quincy's writings on cultural material from Egypt, Greece and Rome that, if known at all, are read today. This volume of two collections of letters with an astute and well-documented introduction is part of the ‘Texts and Documents’ series produced by the Getty Research Institute. Its publication and translation is a welcome step in making de Quincy's work more accessible to students and scholars working in classical archaeology, reception studies and museology.
De Quincy first wrote on Egyptian antiquities, his interest possibly influenced by his freemasonry, and his work influenced neoclassical Egyptomania, preparing the way for the popularity of the findings from the 1798 Napoleonic expedition Description de l'Égypte (1809–29). His career as a journalist and ‘man of letters’ is examined in P.'s introduction and, though his firm catholic beliefs are stressed, there is little mention of his royalist political career and anti-Republican intrigues. De Quincy's first set of letters in this volume is written to the Venezuelan revolutionary leader Francisco de Miranda after France conquered Austrian forces in Northern Italy and the Papal States in 1796 and established a Kingdom of Italy. A sign of this conquest was the proposed removal of antiquities from Rome, mainly from the Vatican, to the Louvre Paris. De Quincy's letters to Miranda object to this ostentatious display of victory. He led a petition against this action, signatories including the artist Jacques-Louis David among others, but the antiquities were removed from Rome to Paris where they remained for almost two decades. The second collection of De Quincy's letters is to the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova and reflects on the ‘Elgin Collection’ of sculptures from Athens displayed in the British Museum. His visit to London in 1818 took place only a few years after the return of the antiquities from Paris to Rome and the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. P. points out the paradoxical nature of these two collections of letters since de Quincy berated France for removing antiquities from Rome in 1796, but then later celebrated the removal of antiquities from Athens to Britain in 1818 (p. 37). At first glance the collections offer contradictory arguments; in the first de Quincy argued that historical context and geographical location is key to the appreciation of antiquities in Rome, while in the second he proposed that the sculptures from a temple in Athens find their proper scholarly and aesthetic setting in a public museum in London. Both collections of letters do, however, consistently illustrate de Quincy's definition of European culture as centred on the Classics, whether in text, art or place.
In the ‘Miranda’ letters de Quincy depicts Rome as a university of the arts and humanities; Rome is the centre of a cosmopolitan Europe based on Enlightenment humanism, which he marries with Catholic traditions. He uses Roman texts to point out that, despite the triumph depicted on Trajan's column, ancient Rome did not always plunder its subjugated peoples and places. He points to the care of antiquities taking place in Rome today, frequently under the direction of the Catholic Church, and argues that the city itself is a universal museum with the geographical space and position of monuments as important as the sculptures in the Vatican. The idea of Rome as a museum is fairly well established today, as illustrated in the range of essays in C. Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences. Receptions of Rome in European Culture 1789–1945 (1999). However, de Quincy's arguments for public scholarship and the importance of historical and geographical context in understanding antiquities seem, as P. points out, to fit with contemporary UNESCO definitions of heritage and conservation.
De Quincy defined Europe by its classical forebears while applying modern geo-political boundaries to the continent. Italy was European but Greece, at this point on the western frontier of the Ottoman Empire, was Oriental, despite the importance of the ancient Greek city-states. This attitude was prevalent in the nineteenth century, long after Greece became a modern nation state, as illustrated by the position of the Greek display next to its former colonial occupier the Ottoman Empire and Egypt at the 1851 Great Exhibition. It is this definition of Europe that enables de Quincy to make a seemingly contradictory argument on the value of the sculptures from Athens being on display in London compared with his denunciation of the removal of antiquities from Rome. De Quincy's aesthetic observations of the sculptures from the Parthenon are insightful and he makes a strong case for displaying them, as the British Museum did (and still does), following the position in which they were found on the temple though positioned at observer height. He points out the natural realism in the rendering of the human body on the frieze and pediment sculptures in particular; observations to which the curator and archaeologist Charles Newton, influenced by his friend John Ruskin, would return a generation later. De Quincy's appreciation of the sculptures from Athens in London are also part of his insistence on public scholarship and arts; he pointed out in his earlier Miranda letters that England suffered from much of the ancient sculpture in the country being in the collections of private individuals and estates. The public display of the ‘Elgin Collection’ went some way to remedying this.
P. points out the parallels between de Quincy's ideas around the public value of art, the importance of geographical context, spoliation, commercialisation and the way of seeing objects in museums with those articulated by scholars working in museum studies since the late 1980s. De Quincy proclaimed the life of art in a museum – whether the museum is a city or a building – shortly before G.W.F. Hegel proclaimed the death of art while the Altes Museum was being built in 1820s Berlin. De Quincy sees the potential for improving public education and aesthetics through the display of classical art in museums, yet placed a great emphasis on the ‘museum effect’ on objects and the importance of remembering their original context. His ideas around this are crudely similar to those articulated by S. Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’ in I. Karp and S. Lavine (edd.), Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (1991) or the contributors in P. Vergo (ed.), New Museology (1989). Aside from the texts just mentioned, De Quincy's rhetoric on heritage, power and exhibitions is more vivid than many current museological texts.
Arguably de Quincy is not inconsistent as he places the public value of arts, display and scholarship above the claims of cultural and political nationalism in both collections of letters. De Quincy's Romantic Classicism and its use in European self-definition is also consistent. The arguments involved in his consideration of the removal of antiquities from Rome and then Athens illustrate the complex ethics, emotions and justifications involved in the display of antiquities in a museum, particularly when those antiquities are far removed from their original location. These were not black-and-white issues then and they are not now. Both these collections of letters – not one or the other – should be compulsory reading for anyone working on or involved in these complex issues.
