Image, art, artefact au xviiie siècle : l’histoire de l’art à l’épreuve de l’objet

Art history, and the humanities more generally, have recently experienced a “material turn,” drawing particular attention to the materiality of objects, documents, and gestures. In the realm of painting, this turn positioned itself against a Vasarian perspective that had magnified the Idea of Beauty and developed an opposition between art and craft; against the reminder of the material in an artwork, and the object in art. But times have changed: the digitization of sources and works of art as well as the “global turn” in art history, now confronted with non-Western artifacts, have offered new possibilities for reevaluating the materiality of works of art. The present article maps this new territory in art history, conceived through an interdisciplinary dialogue with the history of material culture, anthropology of objects, and sociology of sciences and techniques. Scholars of the eighteenth century have been particularly receptive to this new set of questions, largely because of the vitality of the history of the decorative arts and the reinvigoration of the history of material culture and collecting. Three notions, reflecting as many different historiographical approaches, test art against the object: ingeniousness, temporality, and materiality.