Centre for Reformation and
Renaissance Studies
and the
Centre d’études du 19e siècle français / Centre for 19th Century French Studies

SESSION 1
Conceptualizing the Renaissance  in the Nineteenth Century

François RIGOLOT, Princeton University
Sainte-Beuve's Invention of the French Renaissance
This paper will examine how Sainte-Beuve's Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVIe siècle (first edition:  1828) came to birth, what motivated its publication and to what extent its influence fashioned the range of Renaissance studies for a century and a half.  A selection of XIXth-century testimonies will be brought to show that the Tableau was meant to be some sort of a Deffence et Illustration of the Romantic Cénacle, the group of writers who rejected the neo-classical canon.  Scholarly research and nostalgia for works of the past simply became a pretext for promotuion of the modern school.  My thesis is that, in claiming XVIth-century ancestry, Romanticism, instead of defining itself in the negative terms of rejecting the canon, restored a historical continuity that had been disrupted by the negativity of neo-classicism.

Edouard PAPET, Musée d'Orsay (Paris)
S'émanciper de l'Antique : le mouvement "néo-florentin" et la sculpture française de la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle
Le triomphe du Chanteur florentin du XVème siècle de Paul Dubois au Salon de 1865 confirma le renouvellement de l'inspiration des sculpteurs parisiens sous le Second empire. Tout un cercle de jeunes talents (Mercié, les jeunes Chapu ou Falguière, Baujault, Idrac, Delaplanche, Moulin ou même le jeun Dampt ) a trouvé dans la fascination de la Renaissance, et plus particulièrement dans la sculpture de la Renaissance florentine, un souffle nouveau qui a durablement influencé la sculpture "moderne" des débuts de la IIIème République. Le passé demeurait le maître de l'inspiration, mais la volonté de s'émanciper de l'enseignement académique voué à l'étude de l'Antique aboutit à une première rupture dans la tradition, même si pour la plupart de ces sculpteurs, le rejet de la théorie ne s'accompagnait pas moins d'un goût affirmé pour des compositions savantes. Les liens de ce mouvement avec le naturalisme et le réalisme "historicisant" mériteraient d'être approfondis.

Richard LANDON, University of Toronto
The Library of Thomas Grenville:  A Victorian Collects the Renaissance

Thomas Grenville (1755-1846) was one of the grand collectors of books of his time and, unlike the collections of most of his contemporaries, his library has been
preserved in the British Library.  Grenville ranged widely, but had a particular interest in the works of the Italian Renaissance and his collections of the works of Ariosto and Boiardo are the most extensive ever assembled.  He also collected the works of Classical authors, edited by the leading scholars of the Renaissance period.  The library he built was carefully assembled piece by piece over a period of some sixty years and represents one of the most fruitful bibliophilic exercises ever attempted by an English collector. It continues to provide a basic research resource for the study of Renaissance culture.

Back to Conference Programme


SESSION 2
Perceived Parallels: Modern Artists and the French Nineteenth-Century Historiography of the Renaissance

James E. HOUSEFIELD, Southwest Texas State University
The Notion of the Notebook: The Renaissance Mind as Model for the Modern Artist
Nineteenth-century French interpretations of the Renaissance presented Leonardo da Vinci as a distinctly French artist whose work held continuing significance for modern artists. When Leonardo's notebooks were published in facsimile form, beginning in the 1880s, they offered new forms of artistic creation worthy of the emulation of modern artists. This paper considers the facsimile editions of Leonardo's notebooks edited by Charles Ravaisson-Mollien and Joséphin Péladan as documents that offered fin-de-siècle artists a variety of models from a Renaissance artist that might inspire new artistic production. Despite the historical distance of the Renaissance, the collected sketches and writings of Leonardo were interpreted as distinctly modern.

Victoria C. GARDNER, Washington College
A Troubled Heritage: Cellini’s Vita in 19th-Century France
Cellini’s Vita was composed in 1563, but was not published for over 150 years.  This publication schedule crucially shaped subsequent understanding of this artist/author as he was embraced as a proto-Romantic hero, and so he has been known ever since.   Cellini’s Vita inspired a series of projects, particularly in France where the artist had worked.  Rousseau’s intense self-examination, Berlioz’ opera Cellini, and Rodin’s self-identification with his version of Cellini’s character are all vivid and creative but fundamentally Modern uses of Cellini’s Vita that have shaped our comprehension of him to the present day.

Maria Di PASQUALE, University of Texas at Austin
The Analogous Past: The Model of the Early Renaissance for Maurice Denis’s Modern Religious Art
Maurice Denis’s early theoretical writings reveal that he considered the early Renaissance to be an ideological shift in history, a movement from medieval spirituality to high Renaissance naturalism and interest in science.  Denis saw a parallel in his own epoch’s gradual de-emphasis of positivist science and naturalism and growing mysticism and idealism.  Denis was one of many fin-de-siècle Catholics who actively attempted to reconcile these seemingly opposing values.  In the art of Giotto and Fra Angelico he found a model for a reconciliation of nature and the ideal that he was searching for in the creation of his own modern religious philosophy and art.

James H. HARGROVE, University of Pennsylvania
Renaissance Paradigm / Modernist Enterprise and the Mural Painting of Albert Besnard
Albert Besnard, leading Academician and the most sought-after muralist of fin-de-siècle Paris, attempted to develop a new painterly and decorative vision for the modern era predicated on his understanding of Renaissance Platonic ideals, his study of the great murals of 17th century Italy and the Impressionists’ achievements with light.  Acclaimed by contemporaries such as Auguste Rodin, Maurice Denis and Gustave Geffroy, Besnard’s efforts to create an art singularly of its time and culture by way of the Renaissance were grounded in an attempted reconnection of the spiritual and the material in representational imagery.  The Renaissance artistic ideal that painting had the power to make all things comprehensible to the eye of the beholder was, for Besnard, key to any search for a contemporary visual idiom.  What this idiom was, its relationship to the Renaissance and its significance to French art history will be the subjects of this presentation.

Back to Conference Programme

SESSION 3
Recovering the Architectural Past

Medina LASANSKY, Cornell University
In the Spirit of Anti-Modernism. The British Fight to Save Renaissance Florence
This paper will explore the instrumental role played by a group of British residents in the preservation of a Renaissance-period neighborhood in Florence.  Towards the end of the 19th century, the city government planned to complete the Hausmanizazione of the city.  The new urban plan included a proposal for a wide avenue to be cut through the historic Piazza Parte Guelfa--a piazza which had been widely hailed by scholars as the second most important public space in the city.  The public battle against this project (fought openly in the popular press) was lead by Vernon Lee and a group of professional colleagues (many of whom were historians, museum curators, restorateurs, travel writers and art historians).  Not only did this group ultimately save the piazza, they successfully increased public appreciation for the Renaissance.  They saturated the popular and academic press with illuminating articles.  They sponsored conferences and other events designed to cultivate a love of history.  They even convinced the city's hoteliers and shopkeepers that the preservation of the city centre would make Florence a more attractive destination for visitors.  In the end, their efforts were applauded by none other than Alfonso Rubbiani and John Ruskin.  This story provides wonderful insights into attitudes towards the Renaissance at the end of the century.  We will see how the interests of those who studied and wrote about the Renaissance eventually merged with those who learned to live with it and even profit from it.

Ineke PEY, Vrije Universiteit (Netherlands)
The Neo-Renaissance Mansions in the Urban Expansion of the former Dutch Fortress Cities (ca. 1875-1900)
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many Dutch cities were drastically expanded.  After the fortress walls had been pulled down around the medieval centre, a great number of new streets formed a new city for the elite and the well-to-do citizens.  Private principals as well as jerry-builders almost unanimously chose the Dutch Renaissance as their architectural style.  Villa's and terrace houses were now dominated by red brick walls, decorated with gables, with corbey steps, and white details like diamond mouldings, keystones and bands (called speklagen).   The question is:  was there an alternative?  Surpisingly the greater part of this architecture wasn't planned by well-known, real architects, but in general by building contractors, master bricklayers and master carpenters.  They reverted to the architectural language of the 16th and 17th centuries--the Dutch Golden Age--for economic reasons, and not, as is still mostly assumed, for idealism.

Rosanna PAVONI, Director, Bagatti Valsecchi Museum (Milano, Italy)
The Barons Bagatti Valsecchi Remodel their Ancestral Home
The Bagatti Valsecchi house-museum in Milan distills crucial aspects of late-nineteenth-century renewed (often patriotic) interest in the Renaissance, and embodies aspirations of Barons Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi to honor family history and ties. The brothers remodeled their home into a unified evocation of late-fifteenth-century/early-sixteenth-century Lombardy, commissioned recreations of Renaissance objects and architecture, and purchased antique art and everyday objects which, unlike other collectors, they put into use in their home. Our house-museum offers the possibility to trace the evocation and integration of Renaissance styles and themes, evidencing not just aesthetic, but also social and political aspirations of the period.

Jean-Michel LENIAUD, Sorbonne
Pourquoi le style Henri II?
En France, dès le début du XIXe siècle, le néo-renaissance se trouve une sorte de référence mythique dans les productions correspondant au règne de Henri II, au point que ce néo s’est désigné comme « style Henri II », pour la meilleure et la pire des réputations. Comment expliquer la référence à ce roi, puisqu’on n’a jamais parlé de néo-François Ier ni de néo-Charles IX ? Pourquoi le corpus de formes de la seconde renaissance française ( qui correspond grosso modo à l’époque de Henri II) a –t-elle été privilégiée aussi bien dans l’architecture que dans les arts décoratifs ? tel est le problème posé.

Back to Conference Programme

SESSION 4
Rediscovering Renaissance Art

James R. BANKER, North Caroline State University
The Revival of Interest in the Art of Piero della Francesca in Western Europe in the Nineteenth Century
Interest in the paintings of Piero della Francesca waned soon after his death (1492).  Roberto Longhi explained Piero's revival by asserting the Europeans could only once again appreciate Piero's art when the Cubists also reduced representation to geometric forms.  This view was widely accepted, although it also was well known that Ramboux had copied Piero frescoes for the Dusseldorf Academy before 1840.  Recent research showing renewed interest in Piero's art in Western Europe already circa 1800 reproblematizes the question of the intellectual changes behind this earlier revival.  Answers to this problem derive from the elevation of the eye and geometric space central to Piero's art.

Béatrice LAURENT, Université d'Avignon
A la recherche des Primitifs : le pélerinage préraphaélite d'octobre 1849
Pendant plus de 50 ans, la légende a propagé l'idée selon laquelle les artistes fondateurs de la Confrérie Pré-Raphaélite ne connaissaient presque rien à l'art des peintres du 15ème siècle dont ils clamaient l'héritage. Or, la recherche moderne a commencé à indiquer une dette réelle de la plus célèbre des écoles anglaises envers ses prédécesseurs italiens et flamands.  Nous montrerons que la majeure partie de cette dette fut contractée lors du voyage d'étude effectué sur le Continent, en octobre 1849, par deux membres fondateurs de la Confrérie : Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) et William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). Nous souhaiterions ici divulguer les résultats obtenus lors des recherches menées dans le cadre ne notre recherche doctorale, et tenter un récapitulatif descriptif et analytique des artistes et des oeuvres qui vinrent, lors de ce voyage, enrichir le "Musée Imaginaire" des Pré-Raphaélites.

Laura WILLETT, University of Toronto
The Romantic Renaissance in Montaigne's Tower
Prior to the Second Empire, the Academy cultivated historial painting and imitation of the old masters, and virtually every painter commissioned by the state was told what to paint.  At the same time, the growing Romantic sensibility brought with it a preference for self-expression and the cultivation of painterly effects.  Alphone Oury was both apprenticed to the arch-romantic Delacroix, and commissioned by the Minister of Finance under Napoléon III, Pierre Magne, to faithfully restore Montaigne's 16th century chapel, which he had just acquired.  Oury conscientiously sketched what little remained of the Renaissance decoration, but what he ultimately produce3d can hardly be called a copy in "the old style".  I will examine how the conflicting impulses of academic and romantic representation came to be harmonized in Oury's restoration by comparing the before and after states (unpublished illustrations), and by considering the mixed reactions of his contemporaries.

David FARMER, Director, Dahesh Museum (New York)
The "Northern Renaissance" in Nineteenth-Century Antwerp
The founding of Belgium as a nation in 1830 created a need for national identity.  The Southern Netherlands' rich cultural tradition was adopted as the model for a second renaissance in architecture and art by the latter half of the 19th century.  The Antwerp Academy's influential faculty, especially Gustav Wappers (1803-74), Nicause De Keyser (1813-87) and Henri Leys (1815-69), attracted students from Belgium and throughout Europe, promoting a Renaissance painting style and a new iconography based on 15th and 16th century history in the Flemish Netherlands.  Their influence extended beyond the borders of Belgium, including students James Tissot and Laurence Alma-Tadema.

Back to Conference Programme

SESSION 5
The Anti-Renaissance

Laura FASICK, Moorhead State University
Fear of Greatness:  Michelangelo, the Victorians and the Moral Implications of Art
John Ruskin is perhaps the most famous of the Victorian writers to denounce Renaissance art for its supposedly immoral arrogance.  Yet Ruskin's discomfort with virtuosity that seems to him incompatible with humility and charity finds echoes in the art criticism of William Makepeace Thackeray, who adopts the humorous persona of Mechelangelo Titmarsh to deplore the chilling effect of "great" art.  In her novel Olive (1850), Dinah Mulock Craik uses Michelangelo to symbolize the self-isolated genius who drives away human affection.  By these standards, domestic didacticism, although usually identified as feminine, becomes an artistic ideal for men and women alike.

Glenn F. BENGE, Temple University
Renaissance Reflections in 19th century French Sculpture
A direct and admiring emulation of Renaissance concepts and formal types is intrinsic to the broad spectrum of 19th century French sculpture, as is generally acknowledged.  Out of this larger context of close emulation, however, distinctive new forms do arise, such as the concepts of sculpture-in-relief invented by Préault and Rodin, for "Tuerie" and the "Gates of Hell", respectively.  Indeed, these new forms would seem all byu impossible to conceive, except as derivations from and reactions against that referential context of Renaissance reflections.  This paper will explore in detail both that broad background and the new innovations in the art of 19th century French sculpture, as they relate to esteemed Renaissance norms.

Rob BRETON, University of British Columbia
Preventing traditions:  Ruskin, Work, and "Evil Spirit" of the Renaissance
I propose to study John Ruskin's attitude towards Renaissance architecture and more specifically his understanding and subsequent vilification of the approach to work written upon it.  The broader aim of the paper will be to critique Carlyle's, Ruskin's and Morris's nostalgia for the medieval period, but the exclusion or disparagement of the Renaissance in their writings.  I will focus on Ruskin and his attack on the proto-bourgeois individualism and proto-industrial work rationalism he equates with the Renaissance.  The title of my paper plays with Eric Hobsbawn's idea of invented traditions, implying that Ruskin rewrote Renaissance architecture and art in order to obstruct the ascendancy of middle-class businessmen in his own time.

Back to Conference Programme