Christian Michel

Between 1667 and 1792, the artists and amateurs of the Acade mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris lectured on the Acade mie's 'confe rences', foundational documents in the theory and practice of art. These texts and the principles they embody guided artistic practice and art theory in France and throughout Europe for two centuries. In the 1800s, the Acade mie's influence waned, and few of the 388 Acade mie lectures were translated into English. Eminent scholars Christian Michel and Jacqueline Lichtenstein have selected and annotated forty-two of the most representative lectures, creating the first authoritative collection of the 'confe rences' for readers of English. Essential to understanding French art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these lectures reveal what leading French artists looked for in a painting or sculpture, the problems they sought to resolve in their works, and how they viewed their own and others' artistic practice.

The Academie Royale assembled nearly all of the important French artists working at the time, maintained a virtual monopoly on teaching and exhibitions, enjoyed a priority in obtaining royal commissions, and deeply influenced the artistic landscape in France. Yet the institution remains little understood today: all commentary on it, during its existence and since its abolition, is based on prejudices, both favourable and critical, that have shaped the way the institution has been appraised. This book takes a different approach. Rather than judging the Academie Royale, Michel unravels existing critical discourse to consider the nuances and complexities of the academy's history, re-examining its goals, the shifting power dynamics both within the institution and in the larger political landscape, and its relationship with other French academies and guilds.

This work is dedicated to the novelistic resurgences, evident in the work of Hans Henny Jahnn, William Faulkner, and Claude Simon, of an old and forgotten, even rejected, process of thought: analogical reasoning. It also explores the functions and meaning of this reasoning when mobilised in the novel.