La mesure du monde. Le Grand Verre de terre / Vidre de Meravelles (2016) de Miquel Barceló

Abstract

The monumental and ephemeral work Le Grand Verre de terre / Vidre de Meravelles (2016) was created by Miquel Barceló in February 2016 on the windows of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). There remain today thousands of photos published on the internet or kept in private archives, documentaries as well as an art book published in 2020 by La Fábrica where the photographers Jean-Marie del Moral, François Halard and André Morin captured details or reconstructed each of the panels that make up this imposing and fragile stained glass window. In this book, Miquel Barceló named or eluded certain elements represented there. It is from these documents and the in situ observation of the work, which has now disappeared, that we studied intericonicity, self-referentiality and the learned and ironic manner of the artist with which he asserts an original conception of art history and, more broadly, a conception of the world under the influence of the revolutions induced by the discoveries of anthropologists and prehistorians. What relationship to the world does Le Grand Verre de terre / Vidre de Meravelles show?

Keywords

• vanities
• prehistory
• medieval art
• ecology
• Barceló Miquel