Séroux d'Agincourt e la storia dell'arte intorno al 1800

"To show" was the fundamental and constituent act of the historiographic project as understood by Jean-Baptiste Séroux d'Agincourt (1730-1814). His Histoire de l'Art par les monuments depuis sa décadence au IVe jusqu'à son renouvellement au XVIe siècle was accompanied with a very rich set of engravings offering the scholarly community a first illustrated corpus of the medieval artistic heritage. This volume, the result of the International Conference for the Bicentenary of the death of Séroux d'Agincourt organised by the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History and by the French Academy in Rome-Villa Medici, analyses the contribution of Séroux d'Agincourt to the documentation and historicisation of the art of the centuries of the “Decadence” in its various aspects, from the "invention" and rediscovery of the primitives, to the design and graphic reproduction of the work of art as a research tool, to the art book and its market in the European context. The various contributions therefore deal with central problems of art historiography in the four decades astride the year 1800. In this period, against the backdrop of far-reaching political and social upheavals, art history was in a phase of transition from a mainly amateur and aristocratic practice to becoming professionalised and institutionalised as an academic discipline.