-
Chapter Two: The Antiquarian Comes of Age
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
two The Antiquarian Comes of Age The Antiquarian The radical turn from a picturesque gaze to seeing in depth, however, also required overcoming a major mental hurdle: the deep-seated aversion to the triviality of antiquarian studies that polite culture and enlightened reason had imposed in the eighteenth century. The study of antiquities that the Italian humanists had championed and that had fueled the Renaissance began to suffer a decline after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, when natural science emerged as the new model of knowledge, and the work of antiquaries, erudite men of letters, and polymaths came to be dismissed as a sterile accumulation of facts. Whereas modern science, after Galileo, Newton , and Descartes, sought to establish laws and regularities and professed to order the world, antiquarians were allegedly still bewitched by rare and singular artifacts invested with the authority of age; they were resolutely antiintellectual , narrow-minded, and superficial and became bogged down in dusty minutiae only to miss the bigger picture. That, at least, was how they appeared to many Enlightenment philosophers, who decisively devalued erudite scholarship in France. How did the trivia they rejected (coins, inscriptions , charters, monuments, and artifacts) make a comeback? How did the discourse of history, so long an exercise in rhetoric, lessons, and ideas, become critical and absorb the erudite culture of proof? And how did the antiquarian fare in the course of this radical attack? The story of the antiquarian is as tangled as his own field of study and has only too often been written from the viewpoint of his detractors. Did The Antiquarian 29 this figure actually vanish after 1750? Did the modern scientific paradigm truly replace humanist erudition? Was mainstream history really so impermeable to the standards of proof worked out by antiquarian historians? There is no doubt that antiquarians became stock figures of ridicule early on, by the end of the sixteenth century in England, and that satirical portraits, mostly dull repetitions, would abound well into the nineteenth century.1 In France, La Bruyère had ridiculed the fashion for collecting curiosities as a deviant antisocial mania in Les Caractères (1688), where fans of tulips, fruits, medals, prints, books, birds, insects, and oriental languages all rub shoulders in their common neglect of true wisdom and social responsibilities. Montesquieu would rewrite La Bruyère’s sketch in Les Lettres persanes (1721), where he depicts a savant blithely dispersing his heritage in a mad rush to acquire useless trinkets, and Marmontel would soon center an entire conte moral around a would-be connoisseur pretending to dictate good taste but who is outmaneuvered by a young provincial poet who rescues his niece from marriage with M. de Lexergue, ‘‘a first-rate savant . . . full of contempt for all that is modern’’ and fancying ‘‘a girl with an antique look.’’2 This simple scenario would prove hugely popular, and the antiquarian soon came to feature regularly in comedies and vaudevilles as a bloated authority blocking the young hero’s access to the girl.3 Life and grace, in other words, trumped morbid authority. Battered and bruised, the antiquarian entered the nineteenth century as an ill-kempt eccentric, now cast in the mold of the furious monomaniac, pathologically driven to acquire the final missing piece before immolating himself in his collection. Nodier’s ‘‘Bibliomaniac’’ dies clutching two rare editions, whereupon an epitaph relegates him into a bookish coffin: ‘‘here lies, in his wooden binding, an in-folio copy of the best edition of man.’’4 Viel-Castel imposed a similar fate on one of the ‘‘Collectors’’ he portrayed for the large publishing venture The French Painted by Themselves: a man who has grown too intimate with his gallery of mummies finds out by chance that his beloved Egyptian princess is actually a man, expires in shock, and winds up buried in an exquisite mummy case.5 These popular depictions of antiquarians voice a fairly stable moral critique of the obsession with relics: these detract from the business of living. The antiquarian forgets to eat, sleep, laugh, and socialize; he squanders his fortune, impoverishes his family, withdraws into solitude, and abdicates his membership in society. At last, he merges with his all-consuming object—the florist stands ‘‘rooted’’ in his acre, and the ornithologist dreams he is a bird.6 Behind these caricatures, however, we also glimpse a more serious critique of [3.236.234.62] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:45 GMT) 30 chapter 2...