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Journal of the History of Collections vol. 16 no. 2 (2004) pp. 285±309 Á The collection and display of medieval art in the fin de siecle Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz Á No longer the sole province of the cultivated private collector, by the fin de siecle medieval works could be seen and enjoyed by a large public. This article raises several important questions related to the intersection of private and public appropriation of medieval objects in the final decades of the nineteenth century. What was the relationship between the antiquary of old and the modern collector who filled apartments with medieval treasures and modern replicas of Gothic masterpieces? How did such private consumption reflect and influence larger public displays of medieval objects in the period? And at what level did popular consumption of medieval objects connect with scholarly research and the didactic goals of the national museum? In exploring these questions, we trace the journey of medieval works of art at the end of the nineteenth century, from living rooms to major public displays (museums and World's Fairs) and back to the sanctuary of the private interior. A keen observer of late nineteenth-century French  culture noted in the pages of La Revue Illustree that fascination for medieval objects had permeated both the private dwellings and the public spaces of ®n-deÁ siecle France: Our interiors, where we need light in order to work, are obscured by the immoderate use of coloured stained glass . . . our small hearths are cluttered by great andirons in forged metal, made for the vast mantels of feudal ®replaces; the contours of our seats, rather than accommodating the supple graces of contemporary women, with their lightly pleated garments, take on the rigid form of the high cathedrals of the Middle Ages and transform Á the ®n-de-siecle Parisienne into a Blanche of Castille in spite of herself, making her into a penitent chateaudweller.1 By the turn of the century, bourgeois Parisians were well acquainted with medieval art. While newly opened medieval museums abounded with works from every epoch of the Middle Ages, well-to-do property owners, such as the novelist Pierre Loti, often transformed their homes into medieval castles, complete with works of stained glass, tapestry and suits of armour (Fig. 1). In late nineteenth-century France, presentations of state-owned medieval collections ranged from the  `objective' and scienti®c (the Musee de Sculpture   Comparee at the Trocadero) to the poetically evo cative (the Musee de Cluny). No longer the sole province of the cultivated private collector, medieval works could be seen and enjoyed by a wide public. At the same time, acquaintance with medieval works no longer required one to leave home: new highquality colour reproductions in illustrated periodicals, books and catalogues introduced thousands of new viewers to the medieval heritage.2 Exhibitions, publications, auctions, art historical discourse and private consumption of medieval works were inherently bound to each other and to the larger bourgeois audience. The public collection and exhibition of medieval objects found a counterpart in private homes, where the pleasure and status of aesthetic display (rather than the desire to instruct or educate) motivated the collector. The two forms of display ± bourgeois interior and museum, private and public ± fed each other, increasing attendance at public museums and the production of scholarly tomes, while driving up prices for extant medieval collectors' items as well as faux-medieval furniture and objets d'art. The scholarly value and cachet of medieval works in turn inspired a renewed interest on the part of collectors and a fashionable craze for medieval decor. Serious Journal of the History of Collections vol. 16 no. 2 # Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved elizabeth emery and laura morowitz Fig. 1. Dornac, Loti's Medieval Dining Room (the right-hand  side), La Revue Illustree 15 (1893), p. 15. scholarship and private collecting overlapped at the end of the nineteenth century. If a large gap separated the private display of the neo-medieval living room and the public exhibits of the medieval museum, the two spaces were often intertwined. Several of the medieval museums ±  among them the Musee de Cluny ± began as private residences and modelled the public space of the museum after the collector's living room. The eclectic displays of randomly juxtaposed objects, stripped of their original function, were familiar to viewers of both domestic interiors and the wellattended World's Fairs. Much as in today's antiques market, amateur collectors of authentic works (among them celebrated writers and artists) were not always dilettantes, but often seasoned connoisseurs of medieval works and scholarship. To understand the complex relationship between the production of scholarship on the Middle Ages and the consumption of medieval works requires familiarity with the bibelot, a nineteenth-century object of predilection. Janell Watson, Rosalind  Williams and Remy Saisselin have studied the extent to which the bibelot (knick-knack, curio or other collector's piece) fascinated the bourgeoisie.3 While each category of object had unique characteristics and value, each was united in its logic of display, which was dependent on the capitalist market. Indeed, as Watson has pointed out in a brilliant study of material culture in nineteenthcentury France, bibelots could be distinguished from earlier collectible items by their central qualities of gratuitousness and mobility. Freely exchangeable on the marketplace, bibelots had migrated from their original setting (often churches, palaces or monasteries) to another (the antique shop, museum or living room) shedding their original function and intention along the way. To some extent, the logic of the bibelot operated in all the spaces devoted to medieval works, whether private interior (its most common locale) or public museum. While the art-historical discourse and scholarly discussion surrounding these objects focused, in turn, on their religious, spiritual or communal use value, the pieces themselves were inevitably detached from their origins, available primarily for aesthetic contemplation by artist, connoisseur or bourgeois viewer. Whether in the living room of private collectors or in the halls of the Louvre, the medieval works on display had been removed from their original context; their acquisition must be studied alongside the accumulation and display of other kinds of object. Their de-contextualization was perhaps most evident at the retrospectives of the Expositions Universelles, where the works were divorced from their function and enclosed within the ®ne-arts section of the Petit Palais. Moreover, as this study will argue, the more historically important the piece, the more it was directly implicated in the market, drawing additional viewers to museums, spawning the purchase of reproductions or inspiring the production of contemporary artists and artisans. An acknowledgment of the ubiquitousness of the bibelot in Á ®n-de-siecle culture underlies much of the discussion in this essay. This study builds on the scholarship of those who have sought to document the complex, multi-determined factors responsible for the revival of the Middle Ages in late nineteenth-century France. We seek to contribute to such studies by Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle revealing the importance of popular culture in shaping the institutional discourse about this phenomenon. Many fascinating studies have alerted us to the signi®cant role played by the medieval heritage in the attempts of schools, politicians and scholars to forge a sense of national identity during the Third Republic.4 Important studies on the history of museums have challenged us to think about the methodology and design of exhibition and display and their re¯ection of larger ideological aims.5 Our viewpoints have been greatly shaped by studies that reveal how the `proto-consumer' society developing in late ninteenth-century Paris was central to all elements of cultural production in this Á period.6 We focus on this ®n de siecle as a cultural moment which saw a huge interest in the Middle Ages, re¯ected in novels, music, poetry, visual art and academic displines. The ®nal decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an equal fascination for the Middle Ages in the realms of entertainment, leisure and exhibition. Our contribution lies in uniting these often disparate ®elds of inquiry, while arguing that popular consumption and scholarly appropriation of the Middle Ages proceeded Á side-by-side in ®n de siecle France. What was the relationship between the antiquary of old and the modern collector who ®lled apartments with medieval treasures and modern replicas of Gothic masterpieces? How did such private consumption re¯ect and in¯uence larger public displays of medieval objects in the period? And at what level did popular consumption of medieval objects connect with scholarly research and the didactic goals of the national museum? In exploring these questions, we trace the journey of medieval works of art at the end of the nineteenth century, from living rooms to major public displays (museums and World's Fairs) and back to the `sanctuary' of the private interior. What do such questions have to tell us today, when medieval objects are made readily accessible on the Internet, where websites devoted to serious study of the Middle Ages are often combined with oers to purchase pseudo-medieval works, or even extant manuscripts? The domains of popular taste and scholarly pursuit have never been so ¯uid, and the questions raised by their union, a link forged securely at the end of the nineteenth century, have never been more relevant.  The museum as collection: the Musee des  Monuments Franc Ëais and the Musee de Cluny From its origins, the collecting of medieval works in Europe was associated with private consumption. Like the collector of classical antiquities, who blended erudition with an eclectic fascination for curiosities, the earliest collectors of medieval works displayed their works for a small circle of intimates.7 The beginnings of the Gothic revival in Europe can be traced to the whimsical mansion of Strawberry Hill, west of London, a fantastic residence built by the novelist Horace Walpole in 1749.8 In contrast to the `structural rationalism' of Viollet-le-Duc, Strawberry Hill was medieval neither in its methods of construction nor in its design. Instead, the house was a kind of theatrical set, with freely assembled pointed arches, pseudo-Gothic chambers and liberally scattered medievalesque furnishings and objets d'art. By 1784, the private home had become an attraction: visitors purchased tickets and received a printed guidebook. A similarly whimsical intent characterized James Wyatt's Fonthill Abbey, built for the novelist William Beckford, and sold in 1822.9 A product of the interest in the `picturesque' and `romantic', Strawberry Hill developed from the tradition of the collector's cabinet, an accumulation of curious objects displayed for private diversion and amusement. The extensive looting and destruction of religious edi®ces during the Revolutionary period swelled the holdings of private collectors. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, France oered a particularly hospitable climate for such activities, largely because so many works were on the market or in private hands, snatched up from the widespread destruction of Gothic churches during the anti-clerical rages of the 1790s.10 State institutions also bene®ted enormously from the pillage of the revolution. In fact, during the formation of the Commission des Monuments Francais in the 1790s, thousands of medieval Ë works were con®scated from nobles and churches (including Notre-Dame de Paris, Saint-Germain des-Pres, and the Sainte-Chapelle) and deposited in Á the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale. In this decade, the library's holdings of French manuscripts increased by over 15,000 works.11 As Romanticism washed over Europe in the early elizabeth emery and laura morowitz nineteenth century, many private collectors in France, who shared the picturesque sensibility of Beckford and Walpole, became attracted to the troubadour style. While the troubadour style signi®ed an allegiance to the Restoration and a rejection of the Revolution, it remained largely a phenomenon of private collecting accompanied by a renewed taste for Gothic costumes, furnishings and objects.12 Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century many medieval objects had once again fallen into and remained in private hands.13 If this somehow seemed a less `noble' engagement with the Middle Ages, these decorator-collectors were in good company; the earliest public collections of medieval art in France owed their origins to men of similarly unfailing `good taste'. Both the medievalesque decor of wealthy apartment dwellers and the medieval museums under the domain of the Third Republic had their historical roots in the private collections of such impassioned medievalists as Alexandre Lenoir and Alexandre du Sommerard. What began as a private passion ± the collection and consumption of medieval works of art ± was transformed by the late nineteenth century into an edifying and ennobling search for the origins of the French nation. The very ®rst public museum with a substantial  collection of medieval art, the Musee des Monuments Francais, owed its origins to the collecting Ë instincts ± or rather salvaging ± of a single individual, Alexandre Lenoir14 (Fig. 2). In 1791 Lenoir was appointed guardian of the Petits-Augustins, a former convent used for the storage of religious and aristocratic objects con®scated during the iconoclastic binges of the Revolution. The museum opened to the public in 1795 as a `historical and chronological museum' and would remain in operation until 1816, when many of the works were returned to their former owners under the Restoration. Each room or suite of the museum was devoted to a separate century of French sculpture; as the viewer passed from the rooms holding earlier medieval objects to those of more recent origin, they became successively brighter, symbolizing the passage from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment.15 The majority of medieval works ± including many tombs and monuments taken from Saint-Denis ± Á were assembled in the Salle du 13ieme. With its blue-starred vaults and stained-glass windows from Fig. 2. Alexandre Lenoir, Drawing of the Vauxelles cloister,   Musee des Monuments Francais. Paris, Musee du Louvre, Ë Â Â Departement des arts graphiques. RF 5279, fol. 34. Reunion  des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.  Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the room was frequently described as `damp' and `gloomy'.  The Musee des Monuments Francais served a Ë very important function: it protected medieval works even after they had been removed from their original religious context. What had begun as Christian symbols and monuments to the glory of God now became national treasures. The works thus underwent a double transformation; stripped of their original intention and function they became exemplary works of art, prized for their beauty and for their contribution to the national heritage. In this manner, such symbols of `superstition' and `blind Christian worship' so abhorrent to the Revolutionary thinkers of Lenoir's generation, were re-appropriated. Placing these works in the context of public display not only allowed them to serve a political function, but opened the door to considering them as purely aesthetic objects. They would later come to be seen as such in the museums and living Á rooms of the ®n de siecle as well as in the original Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle church setting for which they had been created.16 As Susan Pearce notes, such de-contextualization and re-assembly is one of the de®ning characteristics of both public and private collections: This is the central paradox of all collected pieces. They are wrenched out of their contexts and become dead to living time and space in order that they may be given an immortality within the collection. They cease to be living goods in the world and become rei®ed thoughts and feelings carefully kept by preservation. They are made to withdraw from daily life in order to enable another order of life to come about.17  With its dimly lit, tomb-scattered rooms, the Musee des Monuments Francais also had a Romantic spirit Ë akin to the private collections and Strawberry Hills of its day.18 As Francis Haskell has observed, Lenoir's museum revealed a growing fascination for history, for the customs and period details of each epoch. While the museum housed objects from antiquity to the nineteenth century, it was the medieval rooms that had the most profound eect on both casual visitors and later historians, including Jules Michelet, who felt that Lenoir had helped them truly to understand the past.19 The most important French medieval museum of  the nineteenth century, the Musee de Cluny, was the  direct heir of the Musee des Monuments Francais in Ë many ways. The museum was originally established by its founder, du Sommerard, in July 1834, but after his death in 1842, the collections of Lenoir and du Sommerard were combined according to a proposal by Lenoir's son Albert and turned into a national museum under the direction of du Sommerard's son Edmond. He remained curator from the museum's opening in 1844 until his death in 1885.20 Set in a à former hotel de ville used by the Abbots of Cluny, the museum was very much the product of du Sommerard's Romantic sensibility. Alexandre's goal, expressed in his motto, More majorum, was to make the past live again, to respect the ways of his ancestors. He wanted to create a space that would make medieval history seem real and tangible. He and his son, who followed in his father's footsteps, inaugurated a new concept of the museum, which rested on ensemble display.21 A wide variety of objects from the Middle Ages, both utilitarian and artistic, were displayed throughout the medievalesque halls of the museum, itself a Gothic mansion. Dierent media from the same period, including furniture, sculpture, tapestries, armour, paintings, ivories and enamels were often placed in a single room, creating a kind of total environment in which the visitor could imaginatively occupy the role of lord or knight (Fig. 3).22 Indeed, visitors like Jules Janin felt as if they had stepped into the Middle Ages.23 We might apply a term like `fetishistic collecting'24 to Cluny, whose aim was to make the medieval past live again rather than to serve either as a display of national pride or as a kind of object library for scholars. The interest in evoking local colour, begun with Lenoir and taken much further with du Sommerard, might be seen to reach its apogee in the `living museum' displays like the Paris en 1400 and Vieux Paris exhibits at the 1900 World's Fair, which featured costumed minstrels and artisans, recreated medieval towns, staged battles and jousts, and performances of medieval plays and concerts.25  Growing steadily, the Musee de Cluny obtained Á its most famous possession in 1882, the Dame a la Licorne tapestries (Fig. 4).26 In fact, a number of its most renowned works entered the collection in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.27 Du Sommerard's son, Edmond, died in 1885, whereupon the museum was placed under the charge of Alfred Darcel and the Commission des Monuments Historiques, thus securing its place as a national treasure. By the 1880s, visitors to the museum included a `large majority of artisans and workers'. Open every day but Monday, the working class could visit on Sundays.28 For its many visitors, Cluny undoubtedly served as a peaceful refuge from the modern city. Surrounded by hand-crafted works, viewers lost themselves in the hushed sanctity of the rooms. This display functioned as a transitional space between the private collector's `castle' and the medieval museums established under the Third Republic. If aesthetes like du Sommerard literally turned  their living rooms into museums, the Musee de Cluny legitimized the notion of the museum as living room in the broadest sense. While the mixed media display of the Cluny rooms had as its aim the revival of the past, its logic derived from the eclectic display of the collector's parlour. The rooms of Cluny serve to remind us that interest in the medieval past was just as `authentically' inspired by a craze for decorating as by a study of extant medieval  objects. As both the Musee des Monuments Francais Ë elizabeth emery and laura morowitz Fig. 3. Etching, Chambre dit Francois Ë 1er dans les dispositions actuelles (1840) de la à Collection de l'Hotel de Cluny (Room of Francois I in the Ë present-day setting of the Collection of à the Hotel de Cluny) (from Edmond du Sommerard, Les Arts du Moyen Age, Album, chapter ii, plate iii, Paris, 1840). New York Art and Architecture Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation.  and the Musee de Cluny reveal, the histories of public and private collections of medieval works were deeply interwoven. While a few public sites for the display of medieval art had been established by the late eighteenth century, private collectors of medieval works continued to expand their holdings. Museums bene®ted from private collectors and borrowed ideas from their methods of display, while collectors pro®ted from the legitimizing discourse of scholars and museums to authenticate their medieval pieces. The Third Republic and the appropriation of the French Middle Ages  In addition to the Musee de Cluny, by the turn of the century several more permanent sites for the exhibition of medieval art had been established in Paris. The proliferation of medieval exhibits was a direct result of the growing importance that the medieval heritage had come to have in French national identity. Indeed, under the Third Republic, France simultaneously rediscovered and reinvented its medieval past. In the direct aftermath of the FrancoPrussian War, many valued the Middle Ages not only for the national unity it inspired, but also for the moral lessons it could impart. In what Christian Amalvi has called `the fever of analogy', school ocials, politicians and journalists resuscitated Fig. 4. Franco-Flemish tapestry, To my Sole Desire from The  Lady with the Unicorn, 1484±1500. Paris, Musee de Cluny.   Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle events from medieval history ± the Germanic invasions of the ®fth century, the Hundred Years' War ± and rewrote them as ideals to help the French cope with the post-war situation by showing how their ancestors had overcome adversity.29 By the 1870s, reading about or discovering new aspects of medieval art, history and literature became a badge of patriotic honour. Scholars published a host of texts highlighting the role of medieval rulers in unifying the French nation; a number of these appeared not only in scholarly publications, but also in mainstream periodicals such as La Revue des Deux Mondes and Le Temps and in school primers.30 Such popular consumption of the past allowed the French to obtain the energy to move forward and to rebuild their con®dence. It is no coincidence that the decades following the war resulted in the formation of the institutions and publications that we consider integral to medieval studies today, a body of scholarly works that insist on the cultural achievements of the medieval French nation. Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris founded Romania in 1872 to compete with Germania and in 1874  they began publishing medieval texts in La Societe des Anciens Textes Francais.31 These years saw the Ë beginning of a number of other important publications including Godefroy, Le Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue francaise (1881); Louis Petit de Julleville, Ë Â L'Histoire de la langue et de la litterature francaises Ë Âà (1896) and L'Histoire du theatre en France (1880±6); à Á and Emile Male, L'Art Religieux du xiiie siecle en France (1898). The nation rewarded medievalists for their contributions to philology by electing them to Á chairs at the College de France or by nominating them to distinctive positions in the academic and literary circles of France.32 A common Republican technique used to claim the Middle Ages for its own ends was to insist on the inherent patriotism of medieval French art. Louis Gonse, a crucial ®gure within the Republican arts  administration (member of the Conseil Superieur des Beaux-Arts, Vice-President of the Commission des Monuments Historiques and long-time editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts), attempted to rearm the supremacy of French art of the Middle Ages: `And of what more pure artistic glory could the French nation boast ? What other people could wear such a rich and splendid crown?'33 He portrayed medieval works from other nations as inferior borrowings from French masterpieces. He encouraged his readers to take pride in French heritage; history assured that France would once again overcome foreign cunning and competition to emerge victorious. Like numerous writers, artists and political ®gures, Gonse drew speci®c parallels between the moderate Republic and the alleged political climate of the Middle Ages.34 Writing about the period from Louis le Gros (c.1080±1137) to Phillipe Auguste (1165±1223), Gonse declared that these medieval rulers were responsible for the growth of French patriotism: These four reigns [sic] established the basis of French unity. The ideas of solidarity, of association, of unity, came to life and along with them, that sel¯ess and superior sentiment called patriotism . . . it is with the communal and parish troops that the king wins his victories; they are the solid bourgeoisie of Dreux, of Soissons, of Beauvais.35 The use of terms such as `solidarity' and `association' were hardly coincidental; they intentionally evoked political parlance of the period, most notably the   social policy of Solidarite championed by Leon Bourgeois in the 1890s.36 The present was read into the past, the Third Republic sheathed in the protective armour of an idealized and distant era. Such nationalist agendas also relied heavily on the anti-Germanic sentiment rooted in the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, which still rankled twenty years later. In 1890, Antonin Proust (a former Minister of the Arts who played a key role in the cultural aairs of the Republic),37 demanded the removal of a mosaic decorating the Escalier Daru of the Louvre. The mosaic, entitled Le Moyen Age, had been designed by the history painter JulesÁ Eugene Lenepveu and was one of several representing dierent schools and periods of art history.38 In this mosaic Lenepveu had dared include an allegorical ®gure of Allemagne. Alfred de Lostalot reviewed the incident for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.39 It was regrettable, claimed de Lostalot, that Lenepveu had not read Louis Gonse's recently published L'art gothique (1890), for if so, `the author of the mosaic that now decorates the staircase of the Louvre would have learned that Gothic art is a French art and that, consequently, only at the risk of virtue and patriotism, could one symbolize it by a ®gure of Germany'.40 As Antonin Proust told the Chamber of Deputies, such an image could not be tolerated, for even the Germans themselves no longer contested elizabeth emery and laura morowitz the supremacy of France in the development of Gothic art.41 The blatantly nationalist appropriation of medieval art would reach its apotheosis in the Exposition des Primitifs Francais.42 Opened to the public in Ë 1904 (just one year prior to the ®ercely contested Republican laws proclaiming the separation of Church and State), the Exposition des Primitifs Francais utilized the talents of the most important Ë scholars, curators and artistic administrators of the time (Fig. 5). The ®nest examples of French medieval art, including paintings, drawings, manuscripts and tapestries, ®lled the Pavillon de Marsan at the Á Louvre as well as the Bibliotheque Nationale. The works were grouped in ®ve sections: paintings and drawings, manuscripts and miniatures, tapestries and painted embroideries, enamels and sculptures. By far the largest group was that of painting, including such newly `discovered' masters as Nicolas Froment, the Master of Moulins, Jean Bourdichon and Jean Clouet. The exhibit included many of the most Á lauded masterpieces of the period: the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1410±16) and the Apocalypse tapestries (1378) from the Cathedral of Angers, as well as hundreds of panels and manuscripts by anonymous masters from Dijon, Burgundy and provincial French towns. The French state had acquired the majority of the works during the nineteenth century, but research on them had only begun in earnest in the ®nal decades of the century, during the period of Republican rule. A direct response to the exhibit of the Flemish primitifs held to great acclaim in Brussels in 1902,43 as well as the increasing scholarly attention paid to the Italian primitifs, the show spawned an enormous amount of research on the `lost' French masters of the ®fteenth century, including numerous articles on Jean Fouquet and a series devoted to the subject in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.44 The organizers of the 1904 exhibit, who included the leading lights of French cultural institutions,45 made no attempt to hide the underlying nationalist aim of the exhibition: `The hegemony of France, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in art as in literature, is no longer contested today. The scholars of Germany, England, Scandinavia, Italy, are no less enthusiastic in granting us this claim to fame'.46 Nation by nation, from Belgium to Germany and Italy, foreign countries were dismissed as mere copyists, late arrivals in this ®eld of cultural achievement. The French masters of the Middle Ages, had `nothing to learn from anyone'.47 At last, the curators claimed, the world would recognize French medieval artists, whose `cathedral sculptures, stained glass of Chartres and French manuscripts appeared on the scene long before Cimabue'.48  The museum as classroom: the Musee de   Sculpture Comparee au Palais du Trocadero Fig. 5. Frontispiece from Henri Bouchot, Exposition des Primitifs Á Á Francais au Palais du Louvre et a la Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris, Ë 1904). New York, New York University, Institute of Fine Arts. While the burgeoning displays and art-historical discussion of medieval art are a direct result of widespread fascination for and nationalist appropriation of the Middle Ages, they are also part of the Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle larger nineteenth-century phenomenon of `museumi®cation', which was inseparable from the increased commodi®cation of art.49 Under the Republic, the function of the museum was clearly outlined and quite speci®c; the didacticism of the museum was part of a larger context of using history to educate the masses for decidedly nationalist purposes. As Tony Bennett has argued, the museum served to educate, in the broadest sense, both the French public and the artists and artisans who would regularly visit: However imperfectly it may have been realized in practice, the conception of the museum as an institution in which the working classes ± provided they dressed nicely and curbed any tendency toward unseemly conduct ± might be exposed to the improving in¯uences of the Middle Classes was crucial to its construction as a new kind of social space.50 As such, the methods of display were designed primarily to ful®ll this function. In contrast to the  `fetishistic' display of Cluny, both the Musee de   Sculpture Comparee du Trocadero and the medieval department of the Louvre aimed for an aura of scholarly objectivity, what we could term `systematic collecting'.51 The positivist spirit, the need to scrutinize and assemble all facets of the material world manifested itself in such objective and thorough displays. The curators of the scienti®c and natural history museums that originated in the period also practised such systematic collecting and classi®cation. In contrast to the unique objects of the Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities, the museum strove for objects representative of types that would lead to a fuller understanding of the evolution of art. At the same time, they provided numerous models and examples for contemporary artists, whose innovative art, many critics argued, should take account of the French tradition.   The Musee de Sculpture Comparee au Palais du  Trocadero was the work of Viollet-le-Duc, who proposed the idea of the museum to the Minister of Culture, to Jules Ferry and to Antonin Proust in November 1879, though the idea had originally been proposed by artists employed in the plaster-casting industry in 1848 as a way of `studying and researching' sculptures inaccessible to Parisians.52 Under the Commission des Monuments Historiques, four rooms of the museum were opened to the public on 28 May 1882, with the explicit goal of displaying reproductions of the most important examples of monumental sculpture, both French and foreign.53 The museum also met Viollet-le-Duc's other wellknown agenda, showing antique and medieval works side-by-side `in order to dispense with the notion of a so-called inferiority of the latter'.54 Works from the twelfth through the nineteenth century were reproduced and displayed: while foreign sculpture occupied the Paris wing, the Passy wing held antique, Greek, Roman, Christian, Merovingian, Carolingian and Gothic works, including full-scale models of the doorways of many celebrated French cathedrals55 (Fig. 6).  The `systematic collecting' of the Trocadero paralleled an interest in periodization on the part of medievalists. In contrast to the more `amorphous' Middle Ages embraced by early nineteenth-century collectors, the positivist nineteenth-century scholars set about to chronicle and distinguish among the various eras of the Middle Ages, to understand, for example, the sequential development from Roman esque to Gothic.56 The works shown at the Musee de  Sculpture Comparee were not chosen for their Benjaminian `aura', their ability to resurrect the past, but rather as key specimens in the developmental history of style, as fossils, each of which helped ®ll in missing pieces. As such, the works in the museum were not, in fact, `authentic' examples at all, but rather plaster copies of entire facades or of Ë architectural fragments. Such works served foremost to instruct, to provide easily accessible study material for scholars, restorers and artists. In 1883, the ®rst catalogue of the museum's holdings was published, written by Paul Frantz Marcou, in a descriptive and scienti®c tone, with clear reference to important documents of the period. The museum library opened to the public in 1889 and from 1885 to 1914, Anatole de Baudot conducted  his course on French architecture there. The Musee  de Sculpture Comparee was thus less a place to leave one's own world behind in order to immerse oneself in the Romantic Middle Ages than a site of study, a giant text with three-dimensional illustrations. Such scholarly rigour and erudition also characterized the other important Republican site for the permanent  display of medieval works, the Departement de la à sculpture du moyen age et de la Renaissance of the  Musee du Louvre. elizabeth emery and laura morowitz   Fig. 6. Mederic Mieusement, Interior  view of the Musee de  sculpture comparee in 1882. Photograph Patrick Cadet. # Centre des Monuments Nationaux, Paris.   Le Musee du Louvre: Le Departement de la à sculpture du moyen age et de la Renaissance In 1893, the Louvre inaugurated a new wing devoted to sculptures and objets d'art of the medieval and Renaissance periods. The existence of this new wing can be attributed primarily to the eorts of one man, the pioneering medievalist Louis Courajod (1841± 96). Courajod's ideas are now largely forgotten, but à at the end of the century he rivalled Emile Male as the period's foremost medieval art historian.57 Writing in a style at once lucid and polemical, Courajod took it upon himself to re-interpret the history of Gothic art. Believing that the Academy and `aristocratic' forces had conspired to rid Gothic art of its `savage' and `authentic' elements, Courajod was determined to bring them back to light. He argued tirelessly for an understanding of medieval works as the product of a popular, communal art that arose directly from the masses, an interpretation that dovetailed nicely with Courajod's own leftist, socialist agenda.58 Courajod pursued several theses throughout his writings and in the series of lectures that he delivered at the Ecole du Louvre in the early 1890s.59 He most often repeated that Gothic art was essentially barbaric, deeply in¯uenced by Eastern culture rather than organically developed from late Roman elements. For Courajod, the French needed to look for the roots of their `true' culture not in the Mediterranean, but in the Christian East. Accordingly, for him the Celtic populations of Gaul maintained their culture in spite of the Roman invasions; they were a people with ties to both East and West.60 Within these contentions lay Courajod's second important thesis, his assertion that `classical' or Roman culture had been dangerous and stultifying for French art. In his diatribe against Roman art, Courajod portrayed it as an invader on French soil that had never succeeded in winning over the masses.61 For him, it functioned instead as a bureaucratic imported art. Courajod went even further, giving his argument contemporary relevance by casting the modern Academy as the modern-day successor to Rome, a body producing art by and for an `elite' establishment: `Roman art remained profoundly foreign to the popular masses, as distant, surely, as it is today to some of our arts cultivated in the hothouses of certain worldly or Academic milieux'.62 At thirty-four Courajod was named assistant to the Department of Conservation of Sculpture and objets d'art of the medieval and Renaissance periods at the Louvre. Promoted to curator ®ve years later, he was the driving force behind the opening of the Medieval Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle and Renaissance Sculpture Department in 1893. On the occasion of the opening, Courajod published his  Histoire du departement de la sculpture moderne au  Musee du Louvre, in which he chronicled the prehistory of the new sculpture wing.63 He traced its formation to the 1850s, citing the correspondence between the sculpture department, the Minister of  Culture and Leon de Laborde, the head of the Louvre's sculpture wing. On 29 October 1850 de Laborde had called for perseverance in the creation  of a special Musee de Sculpture du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance, despite previous lack of popular enthusiasm for it.64 As Courajod noted, the public had been slow to recognize the national treasures of the medieval age: `The taste and fashion of the day would still seem to allow the medieval and Renaissance periods to be appreciated only for their bibelots. We cannot refrain from mentioning the sudden decline in public sentiment'.65 To counter this phenomenon, the director had requested `the complete and chronological organization of art history from the medieval and Renaissance periods . . . the most interesting period for French art'.66 With this call, the collection began in earnest, characterized by a `judicious spirit of scienti®c classi®cation'.67 In a spirit of scholarly rigour, Courajod and his colleagues expanded and attempted to `complete' the existing monuments in the Louvre (derived mostly from the royal collections, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and  certain pieces from Lenoir's Musee des Monuments Francais).68 In his zeal, Courajod collected well over Ë 1,000 pieces, from thirteenth-century standing Madonnas to fragments of architectural capitals and large-scale tombs69 (Fig. 7). The motivation behind the collection was no longer pleasure or an attempt to escape into the Romantic past, but didacticism; the desire to teach the public to appreciate medieval and Renaissance art as more than mere bibelots. Despite Courajod's unexpected death in 1896, by the ®rst decade of the twentieth century the collection had blossomed into a real department, arranged in roughly chronological and `scienti®c' (if hardly `complete') manner.70 Critics widely praised the results of Courajod's `dream' of completing Lenoir's  Musee des Monuments Francais.71 The ground ¯oor Ë along the Court of the Old Louvre was now given over to sculpture, with the medieval and Renaissance pieces located in ®ve rooms along the Seine, near the Pont des Arts.72 The focus of the collection was on royal portraiture and tombs. In Room 55 the visitor encountered works from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, including architectural fragments, a Christ Cruci®ed and a Seated Virgin. This led into Room 56, which held numerous Virgins of the sixteenth century as well as the greatly treasured portraits of Charles V and his wife Jeanne de Bourbon. A ®fteenth-century doorway lead to Room 57, containing Gothic fragments, including ruins of sculpture from Notre-Dame de Paris. Statues and gisant tombs (such as that of King  Philip VI of Valois, by Andre Beauneveu, and the tomb of Philippe Pot (1494) ) were displayed in Room 58. The ®nal room, 59, displayed `Gothic' statuary by Michel Colombe along with Renaissance marbles. The strict isolation of sculptured works from medieval pieces in other media contrasted sharply with the more cluttered tableau vivant display at Cluny. To glimpse French primitif painting, for example, the visitor to the Louvre would have had to cross over to Room `L' of the Grand Gallery of paintings, leaving behind the sculpture wing. Despite Courajod's rage against the dry bureaucratic model of the Academy and the Republican art establishment, the Louvre collection that he helped to found participated very much in the positivist and `objective' mode of the late nineteenth century. Fig. 7. Tomb of Philippe Pot, Grand Senechal of Burgundy, last quarter of the ®fteenth century. From the Abbey Church of  Citeaux, Burgundy, France. Inv. RF 795. Paris, Musee du   Louvre. Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource New York. elizabeth emery and laura morowitz Ironically, while Courajod championed a `popular and communal' art of the Middle Ages, the setting of his scholarship was perhaps the most erudite and least `popular' of all the displays of medieval art in Á the ®n de siecle. This irony was not lost on visitors, who, like Durtal, the protagonist of several of J.-K. Huysmans' novels, found the primitifs of the Louvre `lonely'.73 Within the sterile walls of the museum, divorced from the furniture, tapestries and other works of art that originally surrounded them, the primitif paintings become mere objects, no longer capable of resurrecting a period atmosphere. Medieval art at the World's Fairs While didacticism held sway at museums like the   Louvre and the Musee de Sculpture Comparee, the Expositions Universelles of the late nineteenth century combined these instructional goals with a more accessible and popular appropriation of the Middle Ages. As part of a wide eort to celebrate `French genius', both the 1889 and 1900 fairs included large retrospectives of medieval art (this aside from the roundly celebrated Paris en 1400 and Vieux Paris `living exhibits' that enthralled visitors in 1900).74 Earlier expositions had included choice examples of medieval art.75 These shows performed the important function of reconciling consumer products with medieval works: displays of Gothic art were incorporated into the larger setting of the fair, much of which was devoted to the promotion of commercial objects.76 Moreover, the larger function of the exhibition (dating back to the displays of the Crystal Palace) also served to reconcile a still ¯ourishing tradition of luxury hand-production with new machine-based works.77 The Expositions also harmonized other modes and methods of display in the late nineteenth century, mingling the didactic goal of the museum and its aim of democratizing taste with works culled from established private collections. At the 1889 World's Fair, under the impetus of Antonin Proust, who then held the title of President  of the Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs, many French church treasures were gathered into a large retrospective of medieval art.78 They included works in various media and from a wide range of medieval periods, from a Carolingian ivory triptych, to a seated wooden Virgin of the thirteenth century, to the famed tapestries from the Cathedral of Angers. A large share came from private collectors, shown sideby-side with those lent from large provincial museums.79 Curators arranged the works chronologically in  two large rooms of the Palais du Trocadero. Writing in the catalogue accompanying the show, the critic  Edmond Bonnafee noted that the ®rst masterpieces of French art were created within religious institutions during the Middle Ages: `At the entrance, here are the treasures of the most ancient of our churches and our abbeys. The monastery is our ®rst atelier'.80 For Molinier, the retrospective served as `one of the greatest educational projects accomplished during  the last ten years'.81 The Trocadero exhibit was unparalleled in its scope and in its ambitious attempt to exhibit works normally found in very dierent display conditions: For those of us who live among dead things, working without cease to reconstitute their chronology, their  nationality, their family, the Trocadero will be an abundant mine of revelations. Never have the treasures of our churches been presented in such an ensemble; never have we reunited, side by side, these similar specimens from our Parisian cabinets. Among the monuments borrowed from private collections and from provincial museums, a large number are exhibited here for the very ®rst time and have never before been seen at any Exhibition.82 Despite its instructional function and its implicit nationalist agenda, the retrospective also harked back to the tradition of private collecting, as Bonna fee astutely noted: `It is still, if you like, an incomparable cabinet d'amateur; because the amateur is named France and all or nearly all that he displays is his work and carries his signature. In this high society salon, all of us speak the same language and understand one another implicitly'.83 According to Bonna fee, France itself had become a collector; such rhetoric removed the elitism from private collecting. All citizens could thus bask in the glory of their shared patrimony. Such heritage was clearly harmonious with recent Republican achievements. Hailing the medieval tradition, the retrospective served to counterbalance the Exposition's emphatic celebration of technology. Modern France, symbolized by the shining new Eiel Tower, had not forgotten its past. To this end, the vestibule of the Galerie des Machines was lined with six stained-glass windows designed by Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle  Charles Champigneulle. The six windows, La CerÁ amique, L'Orfevrerie, Le Verre, La Tapisserie, La Pierre and Le Bois drew more on Renaissance than Gothic prototypes in their use of perspective and their inclusion of classical architecture and putti. Yet the underlying theme of the series ± the division of art into material or media ± clearly evoked the practices of medieval artisanal guilds, further suggesting a continuity rather than a break between medieval and Republican France. In contrast to many private collectors, the Republican organizers clearly aimed to show that the distant past and the industrial present were not anathema, but participated in the same spirit, paralleling a strategy often adopted by Republican politicians, critics and cultural leaders such as Louis Gonse84 and Viollet-leDuc. In this, the designs of Viollet-le-Duc had served as a precedent, his constructions of glass and steel creating a kind of modern medieval art infused with Gothic design principles but partaking of the materials of the new age.85 Likewise, the 1900 World's Fair encouraged the use of medieval art to inspire and educate contemporary artists, all in the context of promoting Republican notions of progress. Among the hundreds of exhibitions was an impressive retrospective of stained glass, situated in a pavilion on the Esplanade des Invalides. Arranged around a central court in the Petit Palais were French works from `the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century'.86 Organized by Emile Molinier, Roger Marx and Paul Frantz Marcou, the exhibit included gold work, bronzes, enamels, furniture, wood, tapestries, glass work, ivories, lead pieces, antique ceramics, faience and porcelain. A central ring of furniture surrounded this display, beginning with medieval furniture on the left and continuing through furniture from the age of Louis XVI. As Debora Silverman has noted, rococo furniture design was widely acclaimed at the exhibit.87 However, the show also included many notable  examples of thirteenth-century champleve enamel work, medieval tapestries and ®fteenth-century primitif paintings.88  In contrast to the display employed at the Musee de Cluny, the works of the 1900 retrospective were not organically united in a thematic presentation, a kind of medieval chamber come to life with authentic objects. Nor did they follow the `systematic' and `chronological' display seen at museums such as the   Louvre or the Musee de Sculpture Comparee. Instead, the works were presented in a disjunctive manner, each oered as a kind of singular masterpiece, all under the roof of a proper art museum, the Petit Palais. Without doubt, displaying the pieces in this context and in this manner assured that the viewer would recognize them ®rst as aesthetic or artistic achievements, rather than as relics of the past or as objects of historical study. As works of art, they came to be valued for their artistic aura above all, setting them apart from `ordinary' commodities, while allowing their assimilation into the marketplace. They had once belonged to noble families and wealthy collectors, yet the Exposition oered them to the contemplation of all its visitors, who could take pride in these objects as `theirs'. In this manner, the World's Fairs and the numerous publications that accompanied them ± from guidebooks to weekly articles in notable academic journals ± bridged the gap between the erudite scholar, the bourgeois consumer and the private collector. Medieval art for all: publications and advertisements If the World's Fairs succeeded in bringing medieval art to the masses, publications (and the advertisements that sustained them) furthered this phenomenon. Moreover, they made it possible to access medieval art without ever leaving home. Bourgeois consumers could consult high-quality reproductions and scholarly texts from their armchairs, while turning their homes into `castles' by purchasing inexpensive reproductions of authentic works. By mid-century, the advent of chromolithography and photography made possible the production of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts. The most important project of this nature dated from the 1830s. Under the July Monarchy, Comte Auguste de Bastard d'Estang received well over 1,000,000 Fr  for his Peintures et ornements de manuscrits, classes dans un ordre chronologique. Bastard d'Estang's project re¯ects the manner in which medieval manuscripts had largely come to be received by collectors; as individual leaves or cuttings, aesthetic fragments rather than entire books. The extensive hand-colouring and gilding of Bastard's reproductions made them prohibitively expensive, so by the end of the elizabeth emery and laura morowitz century publishing ®rms like Firmin-Didot sought new ways, largely through the use of photographic reproduction, to make such facsimiles more accessible to a wider public.89 As Michael Camille has observed, by 1904 readers could purchase their own Á abbreviated `simulacra' of the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry: Paul Durrieu published the ®rst monograph of the manuscript (in an edition that contained sixty-®ve black and white heliogravure reproductions) to coincide with the Exposition des Primitifs Francais.90 Ë In addition to the more deluxe publications, readers could garner the latest scholarly and popular discourse on medieval art through numerous journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, La Revue En cyclopedique and the more popular L'Illustration and  Le Figaro illustre, which reported regularly on recent exhibitions, books and museum acquisitions, often publishing lithographs or photographs of the works of art. Even readers of the daily newspaper, Le Temps, followed the new works entering public  museums such as the Musee de Cluny or the Louvre.91 Such publications oered lengthy academic articles on medieval artists and works of art, presented side-by-side with advertisements for the sale of medieval works, of products to `medievalize' one's own dwelling, or reproductions of medieval `masterpieces' and of pictures of celebrity living rooms. They made even the works of private collections, such as the numerous pieces assembled by Ernest Odiot ± from eleventh-century ivories to a fourteenth-century statue of Saint John the Baptist ± known to a wide public.92 If the bourgeois and working class audience learned about medieval art through these publications, they also became better consumers because of them. In fact, the high regard society held for good collectors derived in part from familiarity with the activities of medieval patrons. The Duc de Berry, for example, became a widely revered ®gure at the end of the nineteenth century; art critics and scholars viewed him as a man of wealth and taste who singlehandedly brought some of the greatest Gothic works into existence.93 Thanks to an inventory published by Jules Guirey in 1894 and to luxurious   books like Les Travaux d'art executes pour Jean de  France, duc de Berry, avec une etude biographique sur  les artistes employes par ce Prince, published the same Á year, readers knew about more than the Tres Riches Heures manuscript. They could read about his entire collection and his relationship with the artists of his day.94 By acquiring objects belonging to the Duc de Berry, or by ®nding unusual pieces of medieval art, modern bibeloteurs could distinguish themselves from their peers; they took pride in their collections, knowing that they were following in the footsteps of the Duc de Berry, the Duc d'Aumale (his heir and Á future owner of Les Tres Riches Heures), the Medici princes, Lenoir or du Sommerard. The Gazette des Beaux-Arts, founded in 1859 by Charles Blanc with the explicit aim of `enlightening amateurs and keeping them informed about developments throughout the world', often included lengthy articles about private collectors and their holdings.95 In March 1891, for example, readers could learn about the Strauss collection recently  donated to the Musee de Cluny by the Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild.96 Begun by the conductor Isaac Strauss, the collection consisted of a great deal of medieval Judaica, including furniture, tapestries, jewellery, manuscripts and drawings, undoubtedly functioning in part to `prove' the positive Jewish contribution to France's medieval heritage (a contribution disputed by many historians, writers and political ®gures).97 While museums clearly gained precious holdings in this manner, the collectors also bene®ted by joining the artistic pantheon of men like Lenoir and du Sommerard. Those who amassed coherent groups of objects ± collections instead of a random assortment of objects ± were praised for their taste and their erudition. One of the most important private collections of medieval art, the Spitzer Collection, was well pub licized, especially in La Revue Illustree and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which published a full-scale catalogue devoted to it. This March 1890 issue detailed the extensive holdings of ivories, gold work, religious objects and tapestries in the collection98 (Fig. 8). In 1878 Fredric Spitzer had opened  the Musee des Arts Industriels in his private hotel on the Rue Villejuste. The catalogue of the collection was compiled by important scholars of the period, including the deeply respected Emile Molinier (who had played a large role in the medieval retrospective of the 1889 World's Fair). A work of notable erudition, the catalogue aimed for the kind of `objective' and `genealogical' approach that had come to characterize Republican museums. The Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle exhibit. Even a scholar as demanding and nationalistic as Alphonse Germain insisted that the French medieval tradition resided in the art of interior design, of decorating the `home'.100 In his text on Notre Art de France (1894),101 Germain proclaimed that the destiny of French greatness now lay in the decorating of chateaux, of public buildings and above all of ordinary houses: To all those artists who are left indierent by the vain successes of exhibitions, ± there are some left, thank God! ± and who endeavour to make their work say something and dream of a real direction for it, those artists should meditate on this theme: the intimate art of decoration, of attempting to put it into practice. And if they are determined to stamp this art with indigenous originality, to base it on the principles appropriate to it, oh! they should draw inspiration from our thirteenth-century ancestors.102 Fig. 8. The Spitzer Collection ± The Weapons Room. La Revue  Illustree 15 (1893), p. 318. full catalogue retailed for 250 Fr, but the truly discriminating consumer could purchase a deluxe version for 3,000 Fr. The publication of such catalogues bene®ted both parties. Indeed, thanks in part to the lustre of the catalogue, the sale of Spitzer's collection in 1893 brought in over 9,000,000 Fr.99 Collectors gained an aura of respect for their taste and the prices of their works increased as a result of professional appraisal. Scholars, too, because of their attention to collectors, could be more certain of gaining access to important groups of works for their own research, publication and eventual exhibits. Museums displayed these works, private collectors footed the bills and journals published the scholarly articles that brought them wide public notice. Scholars and art historians also raised the status of the collector by promoting interior design as a contribution to the authentic revival of the medieval spirit on a par with scholarly research and public For Germain, the art of decorating was inherently French, thus not a lesser art.103 Medieval artisans and designers of churches, buildings and houses had inevitably stamped the period with its unique character. By decorating and furnishing private dwellings, these artists had brought glory to France. Consequently, a nineteenth-century Duc de Berry had only to provide new opportunities for French artists. Collectors and interior decorators could contribute to the greatness of the nation by sharing their acquisitions with a larger public. The democratization of medieval art unleashed by such mainstream discussion of collecting and decorating reached its zenith with do-it-yourself medievalizing products for the home. While the wealthy had real stained glass, the less auent also had access to medieval-style products (albeit in inexpensive and far less labour-intensive materials). Companies such as Les Vitraux Francais sold translucent sheets with Ë stained-glass patterns ± advertised as `imitating old stained-glass windows' ± that could be stuck on windows to provide a vaguely chateau-like ¯avour. Prices started at only 12.50 Fr! Another poster, for the Vitraux Glacier, shows a cosy interior where two bourgeois women and a girl busy themselves masking the industrial view outside with cut-out paste-on panels that recon®gure the room as a medieval chapel, replete with a ®gure representing St George (Fig. 9). In a similar spirit, two journals began publication in the 1890s speci®cally to encourage a kind of amateur, at-home production of manuscript elizabeth emery and laura morowitz the day). Such emulation of the taste, style and attitudes of famous people was a staple strategy to acquire status in the nineteenth century (and well into the twenty-®rst). Like the `palaces of Fine Arts' and exclusive spaces such as the Jockey Club, the acquisition of `medieval' style oered the bourgeoisie and even the lower classes a taste of the noble life while revealing their understanding of French heritage.107 As Whitney Walton notes in her discussion of the displays of the Crystal Palace: `as with the popularity of old styles, then, the taste for ornamentation linked bourgeois consumers with their aristocratic predecessors as members of the consuming, discriminating, and therefore ruling class'.108 Advertisements and publications had indeed created a new breed of interior decorators, less concerned with the values of the Middle Ages than with the display of its noble accoutrements. Back to the living room: medieval art and the bourgeois interior Fig. 9. Artist unknown, Vitraux Glacier, colour lithograph on   paper, 105  77 cm, inv. 997.75.1. Paris, Musee de la Publicite. Photograph Laurent-Sully Jaulmes. illumination. L'Enlumineur (1888±1900) and Le Coloriste-Enlumineur (1894±9) included outline drawings, as well as lettering and ornaments to copy. Like the advertisements for Vitraux Glacier, these journals were aimed largely at a female audience.104 Other companies promised to do the decorating for the consumer: for several thousand francs one could hire a decorator to come and set up a Louis XI living room or kitchen, while department stores such as Le  Bon Marche displayed and sold inexpensive reproductions of medieval furniture.105 Advertisers widely used medieval references and ®gures such as Joan of Arc and St George to sell an assortment of products to the bourgeois consumer; from beer and cheese to magazines, chocolate and photography supplies, this strategy proved enormously successful.106 Like the paste-on sheets of neo-medieval design, the appeal of such products was largely transparent: with a bit of money and some ingenuity, consumers could become king or queen of their own castle (while imitating literary and artistic celebrities of With the proliferation of display sites and the growing consumer market for reproductions and simulations of celebrated medieval masterpieces and their style, the boundaries between the display practices of department store, museum, cabinet of curiosities and bourgeois interior had blurred if not altogether disappeared. The writer J.-K. Huysmans, ever an astute critic of the cultural tastes of the middle class, bemoaned this phenomenon in an   article criticizing the Musee des Arts Decoratifs: `Isn't it enough that anyone can copy the furniture  of the Musee de Cluny by the gross! I understand that we're not obligated to buy, but we can't avoid seeing them because they ®ll entire boulevards and streets!'109 Huysmans's complaint against `fakes' is a thinly disguised polemic against the mass production of once `authentic' objects. He deplores just the kind of mingling ± between museum and showroom, between consumer and collector, between scholar and bibeloteur ± that operated in the display spaces Á of the ®n de siecle. In the observations of critics and scholars such as Huysmans, we ®nd an acknowledgment that the `culture of the bibelot' had taken over even museums such as Cluny. Medieval displays had gone from the living room to the museum and even on to the streets. Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle Huysmans laments the proliferation of cheap imitations, but his concern stems less from seeing these objects on the boulevards and in boutiques than from his worry about what imitations will do to the value of the originals and to the reputation of those who, like him, collect them.110 The ability to recognize and to acquire a particularly rare or unique object conferred a certain prestige that set one apart from others, yet this system no longer functioned once the same object could be reproduced and purchased by anyone. At that point, only a specialist would be able to distinguish it from the thousands of poorly rendered copies.111 And this was increasingly the case: medieval furnishings and bibelots ®lled the houses of Parisians to such an extent that those who considered themselves `true' or `discerning' collectors had to create new means of distinguishing themselves from the masses. Such was the case Á with many renowned ®n-de-siecle writers, artists and public ®gures. Thanks to the growth of the illustrated press and its fascination with celebrities at the end of the nineteenth century, we know a great deal about the private spaces of well-known writers including  Huysmans, Pierre Loti, Jean Moreas, Anatole France and Emile Zola, all of whom ± despite their decidedly dierent literary aliations ± avidly collected medieval art.112 The birth of `at home' photography, in which photographers travelled to artists' homes to capture them in their surroundings, allowed the public to see these famous people in their living rooms or studies.113 Such images were published widely in European and American journals such as Nos Contemporains, L'Illustration and Harper's Weekly. Journalists also interviewed artists at their residences, leading to a vogue of books includ ing Maurice Guillemot's 1897 Villegiatures d'artistes à  and Jules Huret's 1891 L'Enquete sur l'evolution  litteraire that framed their interviews with descriptions of the artists' interior decorations. In this way we learn that Huysmans lined his study with medieval wood sculptures, old bronzes, fragments of biblical bas-reliefs, angel statues and engravings by Durer and Rembrandt,114 while Pierre Loti threw È wild `®fteenth-century' parties in his Gothic dining room, in which `there was no stone, no piece of paneling, no detail of architecture, furnishing, or ornament that was not of purely ®fteenth-century  origin' (Fig. 1).115 Jean Moreas, the author of the 1886 `Symbolist manifesto', lived in the Latin Quarter in a house `with stained glass and exposed beams, with scarlet ceilings and an oak staircase', while Anatole France worked at a Gothic table from `the Faubourg Saint-Antoine or the chapel of Dreux', while seated at a `Gothic throne covered with a maze of heraldic devices'.116 Perhaps most surprising, however, was the public's discovery that Zola, a devout positivist, `cloistered' himself for most of  the year in a `castle' in Medan, which, like his Paris apartment, he crammed with stained-glass windows, suits of armour of varying degrees of antiquity, reliquaries, paintings of saints and medieval tapestries117 (Fig. 10). Like Anatole France, he sat at a `Gothic throne', emblazoned with the device: Si Dieu veut, je veulx (which he adopted as the medieval motto of the Hautecoeur family in his à 1888 novel Le Reve). Fig. 10. Henri Mairet, Une Mansarde, savez-vous! Une mansarde   et la tranquillite!!! (Zola in his study in Paris), La Revue Illustree 13 (1892), p. 349. elizabeth emery and laura morowitz The interior decorating of these bourgeois artists and intellectuals and reactions to it oer an excellent example of the shifting status of artefacts and display in the late nineteenth century: media coverage of the bourgeois fascination for bibelots was combined with reports about new institutional exhibits thus blurring the distinction between private and public display and amateur and professional discourse about collecting. This blurring of borders between public and private led to widespread anxiety, a renewed eort to discern the authentic collector from the casual consumer. The criticism of Zola published by a number of his contemporaries centres on concern about distinguishing `real' collectors from `bricabracomaniacs'. Goncourt categorized Zola's oce as `quite ruined by an infectious bibeloterie', while Maurice Guillemot was `disoriented' by `all of this astonishing bricabracomania': triptychs of primitif paintings, displays of suits of armour, old fabrics, stained-glass windows . . . and it is not that Emile Zola is an amateur; when one questions him about it, he does not dwell on the objects, one does not feel that he is like Goncourt or Anatole France, who take pleasure from the rare bibelot that one caresses with one's ®ngers, that one turns over and over, that one fondles, no, he has accumulated all of this to create a decor that suits him, his instinctive Romanticism sharpened by medieval church things.118 Zola's fondness for religious artefacts from the Middle Ages seemed highly suspect to these visitors, especially since he generally condemned the Catholic Church in his novels and publicized himself as a man of science with an appreciation of modern art and photography.119 Pictures revealed the truth of the journalists' impressions: if anything, they had downplayed the overall eect of what Maupassant had called `the most romantic of residences'! Both narrative accounts and photographs point out the inconsistencies between Zola's milieu and his underlying moral and intellectual make-up: he was not really the scientist he claimed to be, but an eccentric `bricabracomaniac' who loved medieval art.120 The novel L'Oeuvre, in which Zola's writer character Sandoz describes his `buying frenzies' at second-hand shops, did nothing to contradict such impressions.121 Guillemot had insisted that Zola was not like Anatole France and Goncourt, who knew the history and origin of each of their objects; Huysmans mocked Zola for spending outrageous sums on acquiring `fake' primitif paintings.122 Maupassant perhaps most clearly pointed out the dierences: `Zola is not a collector. He seems to buy haphazardly, randomly following his over-stimulated desires, according to the whims of his eye, the seduction of form and colour, without bothering about authentic origins or indisputable value as would Goncourt'.123 By denigrating Zola's attitude to the objects he acquires ± he accumulates them whether they are authentic or not because he enjoys the eect they produce; he does not caress them or explain their history ± these writers maintain their own superiority by proposing new de®nitions of good and bad collector.124 Justifying their own collections, connoisseurs base their standards on museum models that value authenticity, coherence and social utility. The rhetoric used by `good' collectors (Anatole France, Edmond de Goncourt, J.-K. Huysmans) imitated the legitimizing discourse of the scholars who conferred a seal of approval on collectors like du Sommerard and Odiot, turning their private acquisitions into museum exhibits, dedicated to edifying the public.125 Such discourse, based on that found in the periodicals of the time, distinguishes them from mere accumulators like Zola, who enjoyed his ensemble without paying great attention to the individual elements within it and to their relationship to the whole. By the end of the nineteenth century, to be considered a good collector one could no longer simply amass eclectic and rare objects. Increasingly, one needed to combine passion, taste and intelligence, keeping in mind display models and scholarly discourse that justi®ed one's choice of objects. One of the most idiosyncratic ®ctional collectors of the time put this new rhetoric of collecting to good use to legitimate his collecting habits. Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans's 1884 novel A Rebours, cloistered himself in his house as did Zola, but unlike Zola, he carefully amassed medieval objects to create a harmonious and coherent ensemble. Des Esseintes more closely resembles du Sommerard, who created special rooms to show o each of his collections. He carefully arranges a pulpit and an altar, for example, to recreate the holy atmosphere of a medieval chapel, while he collects other objects to fashion a sombre monk's cell. Like Lenoir and du Sommerard, Des Esseintes feels as though he is preserving history by saving it from vandalism ± a Á medieval art in the ®n de siecle direct result of the Revolution and the bourgeois power it unleashed ± and by reassembling it in light of its original medieval context:  most of the precious objects catalogued in the Musee de Cluny, having miraculously escaped the vile brutality of the sans-culottes, are from the old abbeys of France. Just as the Church preserved philosophy, history and literature from barbarism in the Middle Ages, so it has saved the plastic arts, protected until now those wonderful models of fabric and jewellery that manufacturers of holy objects spoil as much as they can even though they are unable to alter their initial, exquisite form. It was not thus surprising that he had sought out these antique bibelots, that he had, like many other collectors, taken these relics away from the antique stores and the country secondhand shops.126 But while Des Esseintes imitates the rhetoric of collecting by discussing origin, authenticity and value, he also perverts the system. Instead of maintaining the cultural heritage he seems to admire by preserving it for future generations (as did Lenoir and du Sommerard), Des Esseintes consumes it; he removes medieval art and manuscripts from their religious and communal context by putting them on exclusively private display. The educative function operating in so many nineteenth-century collections is thus overturned, denied and rejected. By cloistering medieval works in his own private interior, Des Esseintes attempts to `protect' them from the wider bourgeois audience, to shelter them from the vulgar tastes and desires of the masses. His insistence on reestablishing the borders between public consumption and private collection testify to how ¯uid these borders had become by the end of the nineteenth century. Much to the chagrin of Des Esseintes, what had begun as a private passion had become, by the ®n de Á siecle, a public and well-publicized venture. Far from destroying or tainting extant medieval objects, contact with the wider public had assured their continuing existence. In many cases, it was their important role in edifying and enlightening the public that was responsible for the preservation of medieval works of art. Moreover, through a host of publications, from scholarly catalogues to the popular press, these works were assured a `virtual' existence, as they become known to a broad audience. As the late nineteenthcentury audience sought out these medieval works in  myriad display spaces from the Musee du Louvre to the Expositions Universelles, they were introduced not only to the objects themselves but to methods of display once reserved only for impassioned private (and noble) collectors. It is indeed a rich irony that works of art that have come to be synonymous in the public eye with the nobility, with a courtly aristocratic culture beyond compare, became associated in the late nineteenth century with aesthetes and educated bourgeois, erudite and popular culture, with notions of cultural distinction and democratic consumption. Long before the Internet, the displays of Á medieval art in ®n-de-siecle Paris brought the museum home, literally transforming the viewer into both connoisseur and consumer. During the Third Republic, the collection and display of medieval art became an important indicator of the ways in which the public perceived the history of France, the importance of artistic legacy to the nation as a whole, and the shifting relationship between the public and private enjoyment of works of art. Addresses for correspondence Dr Elizabeth Emery, Department of French, German and Russian, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ 07043, USA and Professor Laura Morowitz, Department of Performing and Visual Arts, Wagner College, One Campus Road, Staten Island, NY 10301, USA Acknowledgements Our research was greatly facilitated by the helpful sta of the Á Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the New York Public Library, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, the Library of Congress and the Schimmel Rare Book Library of Rutgers University. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Montclair State University, Wagner College and the State of New Jersey helped bring this project to fruition. For their contributions and discussions of earlier versions or portions of this text we thank Robert S. Lubar, Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Maura Reilly, Francoise Lucbert, Barbara Larson, Mary Shepard, Nancy Ë Regalado and Evelyn B. Vitz. Notes and
Journal of the History of Collections – Oxford University Press
Published: Nov 1, 2004
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