Appropriating antiquity: Constructing culture in French architectural discourse

Early modern French writings on architectural space represent diverse genres, rhetorical purposes, and authorship, testifying to the sophistication of amateur engagement with architectural thought among French political and cultural elites. My thesis focuses on a group of such texts, which are primarily concerned with missing architectural objects—non-existent native French archaeological vestiges or royal building plans under continuous revision and postponement. These texts, I argue, illustrate the unexplored role of French architectural discourse as a vehicle of cultural inquiry. They contest the cultural distinctions and hierarchies embedded in Italian Renaissance architectural treatises by following their example—that is, by experimenting with the visual apparatus of architectural representation and the discursive construction of architectural aesthetics and columnar ornamental design.; The first chapter explores how Alberti and Serlio embedded an a priori construction of Italian cultural heritage into the codification of ancient architectural forms, the rules of ornamental design, and the very criteria of architectural achievement. In imbuing the architectural sign with cultural meaning, the trattatisti placed at its center the faithful recording of the vestige while at the same time cultivating a fundamental ambiguity between archaeological documentation and architectural invention. Chapter Two examines how the poets Pierre Ronsard and Maurice Scève, the architectural popularizer, Jean Martin, and a guidebook author, Gilles Corrozet, accommodated the Italian requirement that cultural identity and status be defined in relation to archaeological vestiges. In conceiving and describing royal entries à l'antique, Ronsard, Scève, and Martin created the architectural equivalent of a hypothetical native French antiquity in which they deployed an ornamental semiotic of French cultural difference. Corrozet, by contrast, chose to reattribute progress of institutions. The third chapter examines how French architectural discourse under the young Louis XIV addressed the fears of cultural stagnation and dependency that accompanied Gianlorenzo Bernini's failed candidacy as architect of the Louvre. Colbert's memoranda to Bernini rely on Albertian architectural aesthetics as tools of cultural self-questioning and resistance. In André Félibien's cultural analysis and Paul de Chantelou's diary of the affair, the postponement of the Louvre project concretizes French cultural identity.