Sculpture and revolution: The art of commemoration at the end of the Enlightenment

When we think of "revolutionary art" in late eighteenth century France, we most often concern ourselves with Salon painting as an expression of the turbulent upheavals of political and social structures in the 1780s and 1790s. The painter Jacques Louis David and his legacy are the primary focus of such study, for the artist's committed engagement with the revolutionary project remains a fascinating topic--and a meaningful way to contemplate the meeting of history painting and cataclysmic event, of political belief and canonical representation. Davidian classicism aside, however, there is a domain of art and aesthetics just as relevant to the study of art and politics at the end of the Enlightenment, a domain that evades the boundaries of the Salon by locating the spectator in the urban theater of revolutionary events. In revolutionary France, the streets, squares, edifices, and churches of the changing city set the stage for a wide range of projects for monuments designed to articulate the visual culture of social and political enlightenment. Commissioned or envisioned by the monarchy, by private patrons, by official circles, or by the radical voices of the French Revolution (notably David, political artist and "pageant-master" of the people), these projects have been largely neglected by art historians, despite the public ambitions and the social themes that undeniably characterized them.;This dissertation takes the notion of the monument at the end of the Enlightenment as its subject. What were the formal terms of the new civic consciousness in urban space? And how did the erasure of the past this consciousness made explicit, come to inscribe itself into the aesthetic dictates of Neoclassicism itself? My aim, broadly put, is to address the complex relationships between public art and revolutionary culture, not only in terms of the historiographic resonances of the French Revolution, but also as a larger conceptual and representational problem in the culture of the early modern period. The French Revolution, I want to suggest, marked the moment when the monument as we know it--as concept, as mnemonic device, as artistic praxis, and ultimately as public statement--became a permanent fixture of modern social experience.