Sculpture and the Sacred: Sculptural Reconceptions of Religious Spaces of Visuality in Paris during the Transition to the Modern Period (1700 to ca. 1850)

• Applicant: Professorin Wiebke Windorf, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448536790

This project is the first to conduct a comparative study of religious sculpture in the period from 1700 to 1850, which was characterized by political and institutional continuity on the one hand, and by profound social and cultural upheaval on the other. During this period religious sculpture made a major contribution to the redesign of representational Parisian church interiors. The study focuses on the complex sculptural ensembles found in the choirs or Lady chapels of Notre-Dame (1710s), Saint-Sulpice (1733-1770s), Saint-Roch (1752-1760), the Madeleine (1830s-1840s) and Saint-Vincent-de-Paul (1840s). The analysis and contextualization of these five case studies is an attempt to counter current research by deconstructing the casual dismissal of eighteenth-century religious sculpture as a restorationist rehash of the Roman baroque, and the imputations of ‘expressionlessness’ laid on 19th-century conceptions even by contemporaries.The aim is to bring to light the major innovations that occurred during the period under study in the visual character of religious spaces. These changes were due to the prominent sculptural mises en scène created against the background of an array of highly diverse challenges, such as the liturgical reforms undertaken after the Council of Trent, discourses on architectural theory and religious criticism as well as the socio-cultural watershed ushered in by the French revolution and the subsequent period up to the end of the French monarchy. In addition to representing a wide range of different circumstances of time, architecture, commissioning and church hierarchy, the five case studies look at a number of different artists, thus providing a sufficiently broad foundation to hold out the promise of substantial insights into the production of religious sculpture and its evolution during the period under study.The focus of attention will be on the different strategies devised by Edme Bouchardon, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Carlo Marochetti and François Rude, each of whom gave individual expression to the subject of the human psyche, emphasizing the appeal for lay participation inherent in the liturgical reforms and creating iconographically complex systems of organizing space in sculptural terms. These systems became the subject of considerable critical review, allowing the artists to integrate their updated versions of sacred spaces into contemporary discourses. It is worth bearing in mind in this connection that the first half of the nineteenth century saw sculptors create and render figures in novel ways which established an essential base for the entire range of secular sculptural art in the modern period. By exploring the novel strategies that emerged in Paris between 1700 and 1850, the project aims to retrace the quest of these diverse artists to understand religiosity in a period of societal and discoursal change and to design persuasive solutions appropriate to their time.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants