The Louvre in Ruins: A Revolutionary Sublime

This article analyses Hubert Robert’s 1796 painting Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie en ruines in the context of contemporary discourse on the sublime and of the Revolution of 1789. The Louvre is represented not as a national museum inaugurated by an enlightened revolution, but as the remains of a dying world. A possible result of the Terror of Year II is put on the canvas as a sublime terror of the kind that had fascinated eighteenth century philosophers.