A Revolution in Museums: Notre-Dame at the Musée des Monuments Français

By Marisa DeMaria and Marian Bleeke

You walk through a room filled with glass boxes of insects, strange taxidermy, and local paintings and sculptures. You’ve found yourself in a curious place known during the mid-16th century as a Wonder Room. This room is meant to show off discovery at a time of exploration and showcase collections of found objects that the owner took pride in. While these rooms are recognized as forerunners of modern museums, the way we experience museums today is very different. We walk through carefully organized rooms with valuable pieces that are ornately framed and neatly labeled. These spaces are meant to educate visitors rather than make a name for one solitary explorer. The Wonder Room began to link discovery and art for enjoyment, but today we link history, art, and education for our pleasure. How did we get here?

Well, let’s explore the gap in time between these institutions in a specific season in France. In fact, let’s dig into the French Revolution and the chaos and rubble that would surround us in that time. During this period, art was being ravaged and ransacked, destroyed and stolen. Notre-Dame provides a prime example of this. The cathedral’s exterior sculptures of biblical kings were smashed and the paintings, tombs, and precious objects were removed from its interior. Art was extremely vulnerable to society at the time and the works needed a keeper in order to preserve their life. Alexandre Lenoir was an aspiring artist at the brink of his career at the end of the 18th century. He was working as a volunteer with his mentor, an established painter named Gabriel Doyen. However, his career took a turn towards curation that was sprouted from this same creativity. 

 

Jean-Lubin Vauzelle, Introductory Gallery in the Musée des monuments français, 1804.  Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This time in France’s history made it possible for Lenoir to turn into something like a curator with a collection of art and an empty space to work with. It was his imagination and creativity that turned these resources into a museum. He built a collection of works that were displaced from, or no longer safe in, their original contexts. He bought and bartered constantly for these things and relied on powerful people to send them to him. After all, he was an artist and collector and did not have the capital or power to make such decisions for the city’s treasures on his own. Both the Commission on Monuments and the Committee on Public Instruction that were involved. Two sculptors on the Commission, Louis Boizot and Louis Mouch, recommended sculptures to be housed with Lenoir. And the Committee approved his proposal to use the Petits Augustins, a former convent, as a museum space in which to present the collection.

This museum, the first of its kind, lived from about 1795 - 1816 and still has small remnants today. The catalyst was the vulnerability of the arts during the revolution, but Lenoir wanted to do more than store just store and so save the art. He wanted to use it to show the development of society. In the words of the Committee, it was “a historical and chronological museum in which one will be able to find the ages and sculpture in special rooms, each with the exact character and appearance of the century it represents.” The rooms were each decorated and colored intricately on theme. Lenoir also offered biographic and historical information in catalogues of the museum, making that knowledge accessible to any audience able to partake in the museum space. Thus, we begin to see the link between history, art and education being created – in a way that it had not before. 

Fifteenth-century room in the Musée des monuments français.  Musée Carnavalet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As documented in Lenoir’s catalogue from 1799, items from Notre-Dame appeared throughout the museum. The ancient reliefs found during the excavation of the choir in 1711 appeared in an introductory gallery. The fourteenth-century room included a marble statue of the Virgin and Child. Funerary sculptures of Jean Jouvenal des Ursins and his wife Michelle de Vitry were located in the fifteenth-century space, along with an alabaster skeleton that had come to the cathedral from the cemetery of the Innocents. More funerary statues, those of Albert and Pierre de Gondi, were in located in the sixteenth-century space. The group of the Vows of the Kings from the choir, including Coustou’s Pieta and his statue of Louis XIII and Coysevox’s Louis XIV, appeared in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century room. Also in this space were bronze altar frontal showing Christ in the tomb by Vassé, a funerary monument to Henri-Claude, Count of Harcourt, and two marble sculptures by Jacquues Bousseau, one of St. Louis or Louis IX with the crown of thorns and the other of St. Maurice. Also from Notre-Dame was a bust of Cardinal de Richelieu, the chief minister to Louis XIII. It appears in one of Lenoir’s early lists of objects in his care as another work by Coysevox, but is actually by the Italian sculptor Bernini and is now in the Louvre.

Léon Matthieu Cochereau, Seventeenth-century room in Musée des monuments français.  Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Alexandre Lenoir flourished in his position and asserted himself in the name of art preservation. Eventually, however, his museum was closed and the objects were returned to their original owners or sent to other budding museums including the Louvre. A major criticism of his work at the time was the idea of the museum being built of displaced objects. Regardless of the condition of the original homes for these works, they were moved to a place out of their original context. However, we cannot let this criticism take too much away from Lenoir’s museum’s place in history, as it is a problem that plagues museums to this very day. In order to display works that weren’t meant for a museum space, there is always some degree of displacement. Repatriation is an ongoing debate within the concept of a museum. Perhaps we should take this criticism for ourselves too and understand that a museum can be great amidst these issues.

So we began standing in the curiously cluttered Wonder Room, filled with exotic and unfamiliar artifacts. We wandered through the colored and ornately decorated Museum of French monuments, with each room presenting a different chapter in the story of French art. Now, when we walk through the museums accessible to us, we can compare our experience to these and truly appreciate the revolutionary strides Lenoir took to curate an experience for his viewers through the individual stories and lives of works of art.

Sources: 

Christopher M. Greene.  "Alexander Lenoir and the Musée des monuments français during the French Revolution," French Historical Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (Autumn 1981): 200-222 

Èlisabeth Pillet.  "Dans les tempêtes de l'histoire" in Notre-Dame de Paris: La grâce d'une cathédrale, pp. 127-133.  Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue/DNA, 2012.