Description
Book SynopsisDemonstrates the crucial role that art-writing played as a tool of historical analysis in the work of the Romantic historian Jules Michelet's work, decisively influencing his most important historical concepts, his idea of history, and his view of the practice of the historian.
Trade Review“In this book Hannoosh reveals a brilliant mind using art to invent a way of writing history, inspiring the discipline of art history itself, inspiring us to continue to build the ‘cathedral of knowledge’ as both meticulous scholarship and profound love of art.”
—Beth S. Wright Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
“Hannoosh’s Jules Michelet: Writing Art and History in Nineteenth-Century France . . . is satisfying not just for what it contributes to our knowledge of Michelet and the nineteenth-century cultural field as a whole but also for the important set of theoretical questions it engenders.”
—Bettina Lerner H-France
“Michelet emerges as an obsessive and at times intriguingly changeable rewriter, and it is in this respect that Hannoosh’s study is exemplary in its choice and treatment of primary materials, as well as eloquent in its analyses and conclusions.”
—Jennifer Rushworth Modern Language Review
“‘History can be an aliment only when it is full as an egg,’ according to Roland Barthes’s assessment of the romantic histories of the great nineteenth-century writer Jules Michelet. Michèle Hannoosh, in her own intellectual biography of the historian, picks up a crucial ingredient of this egg that Barthes had introduced but almost put aside: Michelet’s deep indebtedness to different periods and types of visual art. Hannoosh’s book remedies this ‘lack’ by offering us a most insightful, intelligent, and imaginative account of how dependent, in many ways, his historical vision was to works of art.”
—Michael Ann Holly,author of The Melancholy Art
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Art and the Writing of History
2. The Gothic Drama of the Middle Ages: Reims and Strasbourg Cathedrals
3. The Unfinished Renaissance: Van Eyck, Rubens, Dürer
4. Civil War in the Century of Woman: Fontainebleau, Goujon, Pilon
5. Nation and the People: G.ricault
Conclusion: The Artist as Historian: Rembrandt
Notes
Bibliography
Index
