Salon (Paris)
The Salon, or Paris Salon, beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art event in the Western world. At the 1761 Salon, thirty-three painters, nine sculptors, eleven engravers contributed. From 1881 onward, it has been managed by the Société des Artistes Français. In 1667, the royally sanctioned French institution of art patronage, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, held its first semi-public art exhibit at the Salon Carré; the Salon's original focus was the display of the work of recent graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts, created by Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister of France, in 1648. Exhibition at the Salon de Paris was essential for any artist to achieve success in France for at least the next 200 years. Exhibition in the Salon marked a sign of royal favor. In 1725, the Salon was held in the Palace of the Louvre, when it became known as Salon or Salon de Paris.
In 1737, the exhibitions, held from 18 August 1737 to 5 September 1737 at the Grand Salon of the Louvre, became public. They were held, at first and biennially, in odd-numbered years, they would run for some weeks. Once made regular and public, the Salon's status was "never in doubt". In 1748 a jury of awarded artists was introduced. From this time forward, the influence of the Salon was undisputed; the Salon exhibited paintings floor-to-ceiling and on every available inch of space. The jostling of artwork became the subject of many other paintings, including Pietro Antonio Martini's Salon of 1785. Printed catalogues of the Salons are primary documents for art historians. Critical descriptions of the exhibitions published in the gazettes mark the beginning of the modern occupation of art critic; the French revolution opened the exhibition to foreign artists. In the 19th century the idea of a public Salon extended to an annual government-sponsored juried exhibition of new painting and sculpture, held in large commercial halls, to which the ticket-bearing public was invited.
The vernissage of opening night was a grand social occasion, a crush that gave subject matter to newspaper caricaturists like Honoré Daumier. Charles Baudelaire, Denis Diderot and others wrote reviews of the Salons; the 1848 revolution liberalized the Salon. The amount of refused works was reduced. In 1849 medals were introduced; the conservative and academic juries were not receptive to the Impressionist painters, whose works were rejected, or poorly placed if accepted. The Salon opposed the Impressionists' shift away from traditional painting styles. In 1857 the Salon jury turned away an unusually high number of the submitted paintings. An uproar resulted from regular exhibitors, rejected. In order to prove that the Salons were democratic, Napoleon III instituted the Salon des Refusés, containing a selection of the works that the Salon had rejected that year, it opened on 17 May 1863. The Impressionists held their own independent exhibitions in 1874, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882 and 1886.
In 1881, the government withdrew official sponsorship from the annual Salon, a group of artists organized the Société des Artistes Français to take responsibility for the show. In December 1890, the leader of the Société des Artistes Français, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, propagated the idea that Salon should be an exhibition of young, not-yet awarded, artists. Ernest Meissonier, Puvis de Chavannes, Auguste Rodin and others rejected this proposal and made a secession, they created the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and its own exhibition referred to in the press as the Salon du Champ de Mars or the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux–Arts. In 1903, in response to what many artists at the time felt was a bureaucratic and conservative organization, a group of painters and sculptors led by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin organized the Salon d'Automne. J. J. Marquet de Vasselot: Répertoire des catalogues du musée du Louvre, 1793–1917 Thomas Crow: Painters and Public Life in 18th Century Paris.
Yale University Press 1987 Patricia Mainardi: The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Fae Brauer and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2013. Albert Boime, "The Salon des Refuses and the Evolution of Modern Art," Art Quarterly 32: 41 1-26 Margo Bistis, "Bad Art: The Decline of Academic Art in the Caricatural Salon," International Journal of Comic Art 7, no.1. Timeline of the Paris Salons Harriet Griffiths and Alister Mill, Database of Salon Artists, 1827-1850
Pottery of ancient Greece
Ancient Greek pottery, due to its relative durability, comprises a large part of the archaeological record of ancient Greece, since there is so much of it, it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of Greek society. The shards of pots discarded or buried in the 1st millennium BC are still the best guide available to understand the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks. There were several vessels produced locally for everyday and kitchen use, yet finer pottery from regions such as Attica was imported by other civilizations throughout the Mediterranean, such as the Etruscans in Italy. There were various specific regional varieties, such as the South Italian ancient Greek pottery. Throughout these places, various types and shapes of vases were used. Not all were purely utilitarian; some were decorative and meant for elite consumption and domestic beautification as much as serving a storage or other function, such as the krater with its usual use in diluting wine.
Earlier Greek styles of pottery, called "Aegean" rather than "Ancient Greek", include Minoan pottery sophisticated by its final stages, Cycladic pottery, Minyan ware and Mycenaean pottery in the Bronze Age, followed by the cultural disruption of the Greek Dark Age. As the culture recovered Sub-Mycenaean pottery blended into the Protogeometric style, which begins Ancient Greek pottery proper; the rise of vase painting saw increasing decoration. Geometric art in Greek pottery was contiguous with the late Dark Age and early Archaic Greece, which saw the rise of the Orientalizing period; the pottery produced in Archaic and Classical Greece included at first black-figure pottery, yet other styles emerged such as red-figure pottery and the white ground technique. Styles such as West Slope Ware were characteristic of the subsequent Hellenistic period, which saw vase painting's decline. Interest in Greek art lagged behind the revival of classical scholarship during the Renaissance and revived in the academic circle round Nicholas Poussin in Rome in the 1630s.
Though modest collections of vases recovered from ancient tombs in Italy were made in the 15th and 16th centuries these were regarded as Etruscan. It is possible. Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums of 1764 first refuted the Etruscan origin of what we now know to be Greek pottery yet Sir William Hamilton's two collections, one lost at sea the other now in the British Museum, were still published as "Etruscan vases". Much of the early study of Greek vases took the form of production of albums of the images they depict, however neither D'Hancarville's nor Tischbein's folios record the shapes or attempt to supply a date and are therefore unreliable as an archaeological record. Serious attempts at scholary study made steady progress over the 19th century starting with the founding of the Instituto di Corrispondenza in Rome in 1828, followed by Eduard Gerhard's pioneering study Auserlesene Griechische Vasenbilder, the establishment of the journal Archaeologische Zeitung in 1843 and the Ecole d'Athens 1846.
It was Gerhard who first outlined the chronology we now use, namely: Orientalizing, Black Figure, Red Figure, Polychromatic. It was Otto Jahn's 1854 catalogue Vasensammlung of the Pinakothek, that set the standard for the scientific description of Greek pottery, recording the shapes and inscriptions with a unseen fastidousness. Jahn's study was the standard textbook on the history and chronology of Greek pottery for many years, yet in common with Gerhard he dated the introduction of the red figure technique to a century than was in fact the case; this error was corrected when the Aρχαιολογικη'Εταιρεια undertook the excavation of the Acropolis in 1885 and discovered the so-called "Persian debris" of red figure pots destroyed by Persian invaders in 480 BC. With a more soundly established chronology it was possible for Adolf Furtwängler and his students in the 1880s and 90s to date the strata of his archaeological digs by the nature of the pottery found within them, a method of seriation Flinders Petrie was to apply to unpainted Egyptian pottery.
Where the 19th century was a period of discovery and the laying out of first principles, the 20th century has been one of consolidation and intellectual industry. Efforts to record and publish the totality of public collections of vases began with the creation of the Corpus vasorum antiquorum under Edmond Pottier and the Beazley archive of John Beazley. Beazley and others following him have studied fragments of Greek pottery in institutional collections, have attributed many painted pieces to individual artists. Scholars have called these fragments disjecta membra and in a number of instances have been able to identify fragments now in different collections that belong to the same vase; the names we use for Greek vase shapes are a matter of convention rather than historical fact, a few do illustrate their own use or are labeled with their original names, others are the result of early archaeologists attempt to reconcile the physical object with a known name from Greek literature – not always successfully.
To understand the relation
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives and airbrushes, can be used; the final work is called a painting. Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, composition, narration, or abstraction. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, abstract, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by religious art. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery, to Biblical scenes Sistine Chapel ceiling, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin. In art, the term painting describes the result of the action; the support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, canvas, glass, pottery, leaf and concrete, the painting may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, paper, gold leaf, as well as objects.
Color, made up of hue and value, dispersed over a surface is the essence of painting, just as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West; some painters, theoreticians and scientists, including Goethe and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent; the word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as F or C♯. For a painter, color is not divided into basic and derived colors. Painters deal with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, Cobalt blue, so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not speaking, means of painting.
Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, because of this, the perception of a painting is subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to "light" in painting, "shades" to dynamics, "coloration" is to painting as the specific timbre of musical instruments is to music; these elements do not form a melody of themselves. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting to include, as one example, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense; some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Anselm Kiefer. There is a growing community of artists who use computers to "paint" color onto a digital "canvas" using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, many others; these images can be printed onto traditional canvas. Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature. I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature.
Rhythm, for artists such as Piet Mondrian, is important in painting as it is in music. If one defines rhythm as "a pause incorporated into a sequence" there can be rhythm in paintings; these pauses allow creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art, it directly affects the aesthetic value of that work; this is because the aesthetic value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the aesthetic value. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Wassily Kandinsky used musical terms to identify his works. Kandinsky theorized that "music is the ultimate teacher," and subsequently embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions.
Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet. In 1871 the young Kandinsky learned to play the cello. Kandinsky's stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" illustrates his "synaesthetic" concept of a universal correspondence of forms and musical sounds. Music d
Stencil
Stencilling produces an image or pattern by applying pigment to a surface over an intermediate object with designed gaps in it which create the pattern or image by only allowing the pigment to reach some parts of the surface. The stencil is pattern and the intermediate object. In practice, the stencil is a thin sheet of material, such as paper, wood or metal, with letters or a design cut from it, used to produce the letters or design on an underlying surface by applying pigment through the cut-out holes in the material; the key advantage of a stencil is that it can be reused to and produce the same letters or design. Although aerosol or painting stencils can be made for one-time use they are made with the intention of being reused. To be reusable, they must remain intact after a design is produced and the stencil is removed from the work surface. With some designs, this is done by connecting stencil islands to other parts of the stencil with bridges. Stencil technique in visual art is referred to as pochoir.
A related technique is aerography, in which spray-painting is done around a three-dimensional object to create a negative of the object instead of a positive of a stencil design. This technique was used in cave paintings dating to 10,000 BC, where human hands were used in painting handprint outlines among paintings of animals and other objects; the artist sprayed pigment around his hand by using a hollow bone, blown by mouth to direct a stream of pigment. Screen printing uses a stencil process, as does mimeography; the masters from which mimeographed pages are printed are called "stencils". Stencils can be made with one or many colour layers using different techniques, with most stencils designed to be applied as solid colours. During screen printing and mimeography, the images for stenciling are broken down into color layers. Multiple layers of stencils are used on the same surface to produce multi-colored images. Hand stencils, made by blowing pigment over a hand held against a wall, are found from over 35,000 years ago in Asia and Europe, prehistoric dates in other continents.
After that stenciling has been used as a historic painting technique on all kinds of materials. Stencils may have been used to color cloth for a long time. In Europe, from about 1450 they were used to color old master prints printed in black and white woodcuts; this was the case with playing-cards, which continued to be colored by stencil long after most other subjects for prints were left in black and white. Stencils were used for mass publications. Stencils were popular as a method of book illustration, for that purpose, the technique was at its height of popularity in France during the 1920s when André Marty, Jean Saudé and many other studios in Paris specialized in the technique. Low wages contributed to the popularity of the labor-intensive process; when stencils are used in this way they are called "pochoir". In the pochoir process, a print with the outlines of the design was produced, a series of stencils were used through which areas of color were applied by hand to the page. To produce detail, a collotype could be produced which the colors were stenciled over.
Pochoir was used to create prints of intense color and is most associated with Art Nouveau and Art Deco design. Aerosol stencils have many practical applications and the stencil concept is used in industrial, artistic and recreational settings, as well as by the military and infrastructure management. A template is used to create an outline of the image. Stencils templates can be made from any material which will hold its form, ranging from plain paper, plastic sheets and wood. Stencils are used by official organizations, including the military, utility companies, governments, to and label objects and locations. Stencils for an official application can be customized, or purchased as individual letters and symbols; this allows the user to arrange words and other labels from one set of templates, unique to the item being labeled. When objects are labeled using a single template alphabet, it makes it easier to identify their affiliation or source. Stencils have become popular for graffiti, since stencil art using spray-paint can be produced and easily.
These qualities are important for graffiti artists where graffiti is illegal or quasi-legal, depending on the city and stenciling surface. The extensive lettering possible with stencils makes it attractive to political artists. For example, the anarcho-punk band Crass used stencils of anti-war, anarchist and anti-consumerist messages in a long-term graffiti campaign around the London Underground system and on advertising billboards. There has been a semi-recent trend in making multi-layered stencils with different shades of grey for each layer creating a more detailed stenciled image. Well known for their use of stencil art is Blek le Rat and Jef aerosol from France, British artist Banksy, New York artist, world traveling artist Tavar Zawacki f.k.a.'ABOVE', Shepard Fairey's OBEY, Pirate & Acid from Hollywood, California. A common tradition for stencils is in home decorating and arts & crafts
Theodore Roosevelt Sr.
Theodore "Thee" Roosevelt Sr. was an American businessman and philanthropist from the Roosevelt family. Roosevelt was the father of President Theodore Roosevelt and the paternal grandfather of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, he served as a member of the plate-glass importing business Son. Roosevelt helped found the New York City Children's Aid Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Children's Orthopedic Hospital. A participant in New York society life, he was described by one historian as a man of both "good works and good times." In December 1877, Roosevelt was nominated to be Collector of the Port of New York but was rejected by the U. S. Senate. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was born in New York City to businessman Cornelius Van Schaak "C. V. S." Roosevelt and Margaret Barnhill. His four elder brothers were Silas, Cornelius Jr. and Robert. Thee's younger brother William died at the age of one. Thee married Martha Stewart "Mittie" Bulloch of Roswell, Georgia on December 22, 1853.
She was the younger daughter of Major James Stephens Bulloch and Martha P. "Patsy" Stewart. Mittie was a sister of Civil War Confederate veteran Irvine Stephens Bulloch and half-sister of Civil War Confederate veteran James Dunwoody Bulloch, they married at Bulloch Hall in Roswell. Thee and Mittie had four children: Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt in 1855 Theodore Roosevelt Jr. in 1858, who became the 26th President of the United States Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt in 1860, the father of future First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and father-in-law of President Franklin D. Roosevelt Corinne Roosevelt in 1861 Of Theodore Sr. or "Thee" as he was known, his namesake son, in his autobiography described him in the following words: My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness and great unselfishness, he would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older, he made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded the boys as for the girls.
With great love and patience, the most generous sympathy and consideration, he combined insistence on discipline. He never physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom I was really afraid. I do not mean that it was a wrong fear, for he was just, we children adored him.... I never knew anyone who got greater joy out of living than did my father, or anyone who more whole-heartedly performed every duty, he and my mother were given to hospitality that at that time was associated more with southern than northern households.... My father worked hard at his business, he was interested in every social reform movement, he did an immense amount of practical charitable work himself. He was a big, powerful man, with a leonine face, his heart filled with gentleness for those who needed help or protection, with the possibility of much wrath against a bully or an oppressor.... was interested in the societies to prevent cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. On Sundays, he had a mission class."
In a 1900 letter, Roosevelt described his father, writing: I was fortunate enough in having a father whom I have always been able to regard as an ideal man. It sounds a little like cant to say what I am going to say, but he did combine the strength and courage and will and energy of the strongest man with the tenderness and purity of a woman. I was a timid boy, he not only took great and untiring care of me—some of my earliest remembrances are of nights when he would walk up and down with me for an hour at a time in his arms when I was a wretched mite suffering acutely with asthma—but he most wisely refused to coddle me, made me feel that I must force myself to hold my own with other boys and prepare to do the rough work of the world. I cannot say that he put it into words, but he gave me the feeling that I was always to be both decent and manly, that if I were manly nobody would laugh at my being decent. In all my childhood he never laid hand on me but once, but I always knew well that in case it became necessary he would not have the slightest hesitancy in doing so again, alike from my love and respect, in a certain sense, my fear of him, I would have hated and dreaded beyond measure to have him know that I had been guilty of a lie, or of cruelty, or of bullying, or of uncleanness or cowardice.
I grew to have the feeling on my account, not on his." To combat his poor physical condition, his father encouraged the young Roosevelt to take up exercise. To deal with bullies, Roosevelt started boxing lessons. Two trips abroad had a permanent impact: family tours of Europe in 1869 and 1870, of the Middle East 1872 to 1873. Theodore Sr. was an active supporter of the Union during the Civil War. He was one of the Charter Members of the Union League Club, founded to promote the Northern cause, he has not been listed as such because his wife was a loyal supporter of the Confederacy, her brothers Irvine Stephens Bulloch and James Dunwoody Bulloch were fighting for the Confederate Army. It was because of her active support of the Confederate Army that Theodore Sr. hired a replacement to fulfill his draft obligation in the Army of the Potomac. During the war, he and two friends, William Earl Dodge Jr. and Theodore B. Bronson, drew up an Allotment System, which amounted to a soldier's payroll deduction
Herculaneum
Located in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, Herculaneum was an ancient Roman town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows in 79 AD. Its ruins are located in the comune of Ercolano, Italy. Herculaneum is one of the few ancient cities to be preserved more or less intact, with no accretions or modifications. Like its sister city, Herculaneum is famous for having been buried in ash, along with Pompeii, Stabiae and Boscoreale, during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Unlike Pompeii, the pyroclastic material that covered Herculaneum carbonized and thereby preserved wood in objects such as roofs and doors as well as other organic-based materials such as food. Although most of the residents had evacuated the city in advance of the eruption, the first well-preserved skeletons of some 400 people who perished near the seawall were discovered in 1980. Although it was smaller than Pompeii, Herculaneum was a wealthier town, possessing an extraordinary density of fine houses with, for example, far more lavish use of coloured marble cladding.
Ancient tradition connected Herculaneum with the name of the Greek hero Heracles, an indication that the city was of Greek origin. In fact, it seems that some forefathers of the Samnite tribes of the Italian mainland founded the first civilization on the site of Herculaneum at the end of the 6th century BC. Soon after, the town came under Greek control and was used as a trading post because of its proximity to the Gulf of Naples; the Greeks named Heraklion. In the 4th century BC, Herculaneum again came under the domination of the Samnites; the city remained under Samnite control until it became a Roman municipium in 89 BC, having participated in the Social War, it was defeated by Titus Didius, a legate of Sulla. After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the town of Herculaneum was buried under 20 metres of ash, it lay hidden and intact until discoveries from wells and underground tunnels became more known, notably following the Prince d'Elbeuf's explorations in the early 18th century. Excavations continued sporadically up to the present and today many streets and buildings are visible, although over 75% of the town remains buried.
Today, the Italian towns of Portici lie on the approximate site of Herculaneum. Until 1969 the town of Ercolano was called Resina, it changed its name to Ercolano, the Italian modernisation of the ancient name in honour of the old city. The inhabitants worshipped above all Hercules, believed to be the founder of both the town and Mount Vesuvius. Other important deities worshipped include Venus and Apollo, who are depicted in multiple statues in the city; the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius occurred in October or November AD 79; because Vesuvius had been dormant for 800 years, it was no longer recognized as a volcano. Based on archaeological excavations and on two letters of Pliny the Younger to the Roman historian Tacitus, the course of the eruption can be reconstructed. At around 1pm, Vesuvius began spewing volcanic material thousands of metres into the sky; when it reached the tropopause, the top of the cloud flattened, prompting Pliny to describe it to Tacitus as a stone pine tree. The prevailing winds at the time blew toward the southeast, causing the volcanic material to fall on the city of Pompeii and the surrounding area.
Since Herculaneum lay to the west of Vesuvius, it was only mildly affected by the first phase of the eruption. While roofs in Pompeii collapsed under the weight of falling debris, only a few centimetres of ash fell on Herculaneum, causing little damage but nonetheless prompting most inhabitants to flee. During the following night, the eruptive column which had risen into the stratosphere collapsed onto Vesuvius and its flanks; the first pyroclastic surge, formed by a mixture of ash and hot gases, billowed through the evacuated town of Herculaneum at 160 km/h. A succession of six flows and surges buried the city's buildings, causing little damage in some areas and preserving structures and victims intact. However, in other areas there was significant damage, knocking down walls, tearing away columns and other large objects. Recent multidisciplinary research on the lethal effects of the pyroclastic surges in the Vesuvius area showed that in the vicinity of Pompeii and Herculaneum, heat was the main cause of the death of people, thought to have died by ash suffocation.
This study shows that exposure to the surges, measuring at least 250 °C at a distance of 10 kilometres from the vent, was sufficient to cause the instant death of all residents if they were sheltered within buildings. In 1709 the digging of a deep well revealed some exceptional statues at the lowest levels, found to be the site of the theatre; the Prince d'Elbeuf purchased the land and proceeded to tunnel out from the bottom of the well, collecting any statues they could find. Among the earliest statues recovered were the two superbly sculpted Herculaneum Women now in the Dresden Skulpturensammlung. Major excavation was resumed in 1738 by Spanish engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre; the elaborate publication of Le Antichità di Ercolano under the patronage of the King of the Two Sicilies had an effect on incipient European Neoclassicism out of all proportion to its limited circulation.
Sainte-Geneviève Library
Sainte-Geneviève Library is a public and university library in Paris, which inherited the collection of the Abbey of St Genevieve. The library contains around 2 million documents; the required reading of scripture set forth in the Rule of St Benedict sanctioned the formation of monastic libraries, which consisted of volumes either donated to the monastery or copied in its scriptorium. St Geneviève, one of the largest and oldest abbeys in Paris, had amassed a large library by the 12th century, the holdings of which are listed in a 13th-century inventory; the 226 titles and authors included in the inventory show that the monastic library at St Geneviève consisted of the core texts essential to monastic life, including bibles, exegetical commentaries and glosses, ecclesiastical history and service books. Only a small number of those 226 volumes collected in the 12th-century library are in the collection of the Bibliothèque St Geneviève today. During a period of decline in the 17th century, the library was dispersed and its contents sold, sometimes for the value of their paper alone.
In the next century, efforts were made to reconstitute the library by buying back what books remained on the market. Reform resulted in the foundation of the Royal Library Sainte-Genevieve, inherited by the present institution. Between 1838 and 1850, a building for the Sainte-Geneviève Library was designed and constructed under the direction of the architect Henri Labrouste, he was given the project in 1838, but construction did not commence until August 1843. The building was complete in December 1850, opened to the public on February 4, 1851; the glass and iron reading room has been described as "magisterial" and the building itself as a seminal work in the creation of the modern library as "a temple of knowledge and space for contemplation". The names of 810 illustrious scholars are inscribed on the building's facade. In one scholar's estimation: One of the greatest cultural buildings of the nineteenth century to use iron in a prominent, visible way was unquestionably the Bibliothèque Ste.-Genevieve in Paris, designed by Henri Labrouste.
He had a functionalist approach, which he proved when he presented his design on December 19, 1839. It took six to seven years to complete the construction, from 1843–50; the large two-storied structure filling a wide, shallow site is deceptively simple in scheme: the lower floor is occupied by stacks to the left, rare-book storage and office space to the right, with a central vestibule and stairway leading to the reading room which fills the entire upper story. The ferrous structure of this reading room—a spine of slender, cast-iron Ionic columns dividing the space into twin aisles and supporting openwork iron arches that carry barrel vaults of plaster reinforced by iron mesh—has always been revered by Modernists for its introduction of high technology into a monumental building; the exterior of this Parisian library is plain in comparison to the interior's expression of detail in the ironwork and masonry, due to Labrouste's appeal to his prior studies of Roman architecture. Labrouste's limestone structure stands at the Sainte-Genevieve hill, across the street from the Panthéon in the Latin Quarter.
When developing his design, Labrouste may have added the leafy garland band above the windows on the first level exterior nearly identical to the band on the Pantheon as a gesture of respect to its neighboring monument. Charles Follen McKim used the Sainte-Geneviève Library building as the model his design of the main building of the Boston Public Library. Jean Baptiste LeChevalier Charles Kohler Charles Mortet Paul Roux-Fouillet Geneviève Boisard Nathalie Jullian Yves Peyré François Michaud Marcel Duchamp James Joyce Aquilino Ribeiro The library's interior was used as the Film Academy Library for scenes of Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-winning 3D film Hugo, based on Brian Selznick's Caldecott Medal-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, where the title character and Isabelle go to find more information about a film which Hugo did not remember its name both finding out to their surprise that its creator is Georges Méliès, Isabelle's godfather. "New Library". Gleason's Pictorial. Boston, Mass.
2. 1852. Official website https://archive.org/details/bibliothequesaintegenevieve Henri Labrouste - Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
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