Pierre-Jean Mariette
Pierre-Jean Mariette | |
---|---|
Born | 7 May 1694 |
Died | 10 September 1774 | (aged 80)
Parent | Jean Mariette |
Pierre-Jean Mariette (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ ʒɑ̃ maʁjɛt]; 7 May 1694 – 10 September 1774) was a collector of and dealer in old master prints, a renowned connoisseur, especially of prints and drawings, and a chronicler of the careers of French Italian and Flemish artists. He was born and died in Paris, and was a central figure in the artistic culture of the city for decades.
Early life and training
Mariette was born to a long-established and highly successful family of
Family connections put him in contact as a young man with
After he attended the Jesuit college in Paris, his father sent him on tour in 1717, to sharpen his connoisseurship and further family connections. First he went to Amsterdam, which was the center of the art trade, and then to Germany. In Vienna Mariette catalogued the art collection of Prince
Later career
Through his artistic connections, Mariette was named a member of the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence, in 1733. His knowledge of prints and his close friendship with Caylus and the artist Charles-Antoine Coypel secured him a position reorganizing the old master print collection of the Bibliothèque Royale. In 1741, Mariette was asked to write the sale catalogue of Crozat's collection of paintings and antiquities, the first example of the modern descriptive sale catalogue. He purchased some of Crozat's drawings at the sale himself; a provenance from Mariette's collection, with its discrete collector's stamp, adds allure even to great Old Master drawings: a head by Andrea del Sarto, from the collections of Giorgio Vasari, Crozat and Mariette fetched £6,504,000 (ca $11,740,072) at auction in 2005[3]
Mariette engraved and printed several plates, an aspect of the family business. His engravings illustrated the Cours d'architecture qui comprend les ordres de Vignole ä ceux de Michel-Ange of Augustin-Charles d'Aviler (Paris, 1760), Before the death of his father in 1742, Mariette had already been running the family publishing and print-making business, an aspect of his career often overlooked by art historians. The firm had published Pierre Fauchard's Le chirurgien dentiste, ou traité des dents 1728, the first modern work on dentistry and a milestone of medical history,[4]
By 1750 he sold the family business that he had inherited in 1744, in order to purchase the office of Contrôleur Général de la Grande Chancellerie, a sinecure that allowed him to devote the rest of his life to his researches and to increasing his celebrated collection. He concentrated on prints and drawings, but also included paintings, bronzes and terracottas. Among his great drawings was a
Mariette also collected contemporary French paintings, Although he was immune to the forceful realism of
Mariette's further published works were not many. In 1750 he published a Traité historique des pierres gravées du Cabinet du Roi, on the
In 1764-65 he got into a public dispute in the pages of the Gazette littéraire de l'Europe with Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whom Mariette admired greatly as an artist, over Piranesi's polemical stand that the magnificence of Roman art derived from its Etruscan roots, rather than from its Greek borrowings [10]
Mariette's circle of friends was large, included
Mariette married Angélique-Catherine Doyen in 1724. He acquired a country house at Croissy, which he named "Le Colifichet"[11] was ennobled during the reign of Louis XV, and honored with the Order of the Saint-Esprit.
Mariette's dictionary of artists
His major ambition was to write a
Fortunately a corpus of Mariette's assembled materials— pamphlets, manuscripts, salon and exhibition catalogues, including the salon criticism of Diderot—came into the hands of Charles-Nicolas Cochin, an artist and guiding spirit of Neoclassicism, and, greatly augmented, was deposited in 1880 at the Bibliothèque Nationale [12]
Not until 1851 were Mariette's notes and anecdotes entered in the Abecedario compiled by Philippe de Chennevières and Anatole de Montaiglon, in the six volumes of Abecedario de P.J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes (Paris, 1851–60).
Louvre exhibition
An exhibition at the
Notes
- ^ The papers of the Mariette family are deposited at the University of Essex.
- ^ Walsh 1996, p. 416.
- ^ Christie's London, 5 July 2005
- ^ P.-J. Mariette oversaw the second edition, 1746
- ^ Cleveland Museum of Art, 1940.465
- ^ Patrick Michel, in Michèle-Caroline Heck (editor), Le Rubénisme en Europe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 2005.
- ^ The sale catalogue is Frits Lugt, Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques 1600-1900, 1852.
- ^ Karen Wilkin, "The splendid Chardin" in The New Criterion
- ^ Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.100.137
- ^ A reprint of the letters, with commentary is Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the letter of Monsieur Mariette, Opinions on Architecture, and Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times. Introduction by J. Wilton-Ely. Translation by C. Beamish and D. Britt. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2002. (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 20, 2003)
- ^ A colifichet is a little decorative nothing, a bagatelle.
- ^ From Cochin the collection passed to M. Deloynes, auditor at the Cour des Comptes. In 1880, the Bibliothèque Nationale acquired the 63-volume collection, in 63 volumes, where it is known as the Deloynes Collection. [1]
- ^ Jean Cailleux, "Apud Mariette et Amicos" The Burlington Magazine 109 No. 773 (August 1967), pp. i-vi.
References
- "Mariette, Pierre-Jean" (archive copy of 4 February 2012), Dictionary of Art Historians
- ISBN 0-916724-80-8
- Jules Dumesnil. Histoire des plus célèbres amateurs français et de leurs relations avec les artistes, vol. I "Pierre-Jean Mariette 1694-1774", (Paris: Renouard) 1856.
- Kobi, Valérie, Dans l'oeil du connaisseur. Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) et la construction des savoirs en histoires de l'art, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017.
- Montaiglon, Anatole de, ed., Abecedario de P. J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes, vol. 5 Paris (1859)
- Exhibition catalogue Musée du Louvre. Le Cabinet d'un Grand Amateur: P.-J. Mariette 1694-1774, (Paris: Musée du Louvre) 1967.
- Occhipinti, C. Piranesi, Mariette, Algarotti. Percorsi settecenteschi nella cultura figurativa europea. Roma, UniversItalia, 2013. ISBN 9788865074596
- Association Mariette : http://www.associationmariette.com
- Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. ISBN 9781472438027
- Walsh, Amy L. (1996). "Mariette family", vol. 20, pp. 415–418, in ISBN 9781884446009.
External links
- Media related to Pierre-Jean Mariette at Wikimedia Commons