Les « Tombeaux », quatre aquatintes de Louis-Jean Desprez

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1989

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MESR

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The Tombeaux, Four Aquatints by Louis-Jean Desprez. Louis-Jean Desprez (1743-1804), Grand Prix-winner at the Académie d’architecture in 1776, is best known for his work on the illustrations for J.-C. R. de Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque ou Description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile and for his activities as set designer for Gustav Ill’s royal theater in Stockholm. The four aquatints discussed here, from a series in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, were produced in Rome between 1779 and 1784 and can be firmly placed within the pervasive fashion for architectural fantasies in the style of Piranesi. They nonetheless reveal certain striking characteristics — a taste for the macabre, the imprecise location of figures and architectural forms (Rome, Egypt, ...), ambiguity between life and death — which can be related to a precise model only with difficulty. These elements are also found within the literary context in the Gothic novel and in parody. The author emphasizes the various paradoxes to be found in these funereal images.

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