L’idea di Rinascimento delle arti secondo Seroux d’Agincourt: un contributo precoce al dibattito ottocentesco

Résumé En

During the 1780s the construction of the editorial project of the Histoire de l'art par les monumens (1810-23) by Séroux d'Agincourt, seems to reveal, beyond the attention paid to the history of medieval art, a dominant interest in the artistic production linked to Antiquity, whose parabola from decadence (4th century) to rebirth (16th century) the author sets out to illustrate. The communication intends to highlight how the investigation of the beginnings and definition of this rebirth is a strong point of Séroux's historiographical design in the field of the arts and architecture in particular. The emphasis placed on the medieval period assumes an instrumental and exploratory value with respect to the desire to illustrate persistences and reinventions of ancient art, according to a conceptual line that Pascal Griener was able to summarise in the terms of "éternel classicisme". In the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, Séroux was inspired by the natural alternation of 'naître et fleurir, décroître et disparaître, puis renaître et fleurir encore', affirmed by Voltaire in his Essai sur les mœurs, on the basis of the organicist vision conveyed in parallel by the natural sciences and experimental physics. It is no coincidence that Séroux d'Agincourt designates the chronology addressed in his work as "les douze siècles qui séparent Constantin de Léon X" and indicates, among the first objectives of his Histoire de l'art, "la recherche des productions des trois Arts, depuis leur décadence au IVe siècle, jusqu'à leur parfait renouvellement au XVe siècle". If the Histoire de l'art par les monumens was immediately appreciated as a publication on the history of the decline of the arts, it is also true that its primary interest in their progressive revival was quickly understood by his contemporaries. Through the pages of the Histoire de l'art, the attention paid to the salient aspects of medieval art, particularly in Tuscany, provides the premise for a specific reflection on the concept of renaissance, and the 15th century in Tuscany imposes itself as an exemplary historiographical site of a new cultural and artistic revival.