2024/11/08 by Brian Vick · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #History of Science and Medicine
paper · doi:10.1093/jsh/shae076
openalex publication_date 2024/11/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Alice Goff’s scholarly monograph offers an ambitious and subtle exploration of the role of art and aesthetics in German cultural politics as well as of the phenomena of art pillaging and art restitution in the age of the French Revolution and of the Wars against Napoleon. The book’s primary aim is less to recount the history of either strand—which have been well studied—but instead to argue for the centrality of the connections between them, and not only at the level of high theory among art critics and philosophers or of institutional development among statesmen and administrators but also through the experience of the mundane materiality of works of art by a range of less high profile actors and observers, from museum guards and art administrators to museum visitors and artists or scholars. From the cracked arms of an iconic ancient bronze to a putative pagan altar from a Christian cathedral, and from a young woman swooning before the Apollo Belvedere in the newly established Louvre in the 1790s to the frustrated efforts of a group of bourgeois women seeking to see the reverse sides of panels from a Christian altar in the newly constructed museum in Berlin in the 1830s, Goff’s work spotlights both the increasingly elevated status and the heightened precarity of artworks as they were shunted to and fro across a war-torn continent.