Comment a-t-on apprécié et compris la sculpture de l’Antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Âge auxXIXe-XXe siècles ?

Abstract

Since the sculptures of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages were discovered during the modern period, they have given rise to contradictory judgements. Considered crude, they were also looked upon with pride, as witnesses to the antiquity of a territory. This view was pursued throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, with all the nationalistic and sectarian pitfalls that it could entail. Then the works benefited from a re-evaluation of their aesthetics, largely due to the influence of the artistic revolutions of the 1900s. In the second half of the twentieth century, the epistemological framework was overturned by the contribution of archaeological and archaeometric methods. However, our field of study requires a new approach, especially in the form of complete corpuses linked to architecture.

Keywords

• historiography
• primitivism
• Christian archaeology
• nationalism
• Franco-German conflicts
• Alois Riegl