Forms of the Antique: Edme Bouchardon and the Sculptural Imaginary, 1723-1762 14 views

The sculptor Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762) has long been understood as a transitional figure bridging the divide between rococo and neoclassical in eighteenth-century European art. Bouchardon’s contemporary critics and friends like Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), Anne Claude Philippe, Comte de Caylus (1692-1765) and Denis Diderot (1713-1784) constructed his authorial persona around the rejection of pictorial values associated with the domestic art of the decaying ancien régime. On the basis of his monumental public works – the Fountain the Four Seasons (1745), Cupid Carving his Bow from the Club of Hercules (1750) and Equestrian Monument to Louis XV (1748-1763) – Bouchardon’s return to Greek and Roman models has been interpreted as a decisive clarification of sculpture’s specificity as free-standing statuary vis-a-vis painting, a division that came to define the modern system of the fine arts until the middle of the twentieth century. Moreover, Bouchardon’s return to ancient models is said to prefigure Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s neoclassical aesthetics, and with it a new conception of national public space defined by the encounter with the marble statue. The independence of the statue and its activation of public space comprise what Alexander Potts calls the “sculptural imagination” of modernity, a paradigm that continues to organize art historical research and curatorial practice in the subfield of sculpture studies and art history more broadly. This dissertation tests the hypothesis of the modern sculptural imaginary by examining three sets of objects: the classicizing portrait busts Bouchardon carved in Rome between 1727-1730, his drawings of engraved gems in the Royal Cabinet for Pierre-Jean Mariette’s Traité des pierres gravées (1737-1750) and his designs for medals, tokens, and coinage at the Paris Mint between 1737 and his death in 1762. Redefined as “antiquarian,” “decorative” and “minor” arts at the end of the century, I argue that portable and reproducible relief sculptures like gems and medals played a central role in the transnational circulation of antique forms. Because they are held in the hand and can be transmitted via impressions, such objects were capable of collapsing space and creating effects of intimacy considered foreign to sculpture. Putting into question the paradigm of the statue and the division of painting and sculpture, Bouchardon’s practice provides a model for how sculptural intermediality might illuminate a more expansive and transnational history of sculpture.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

art; sculpture; enlightenment; aesthetics

English

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2026-08-04