ArTerm

The ArTerm project inquiries a key moment in French cultural history by proposing to examine the hypothesis of an interdependence between France and Italy in the progressive elaboration of the notion of "heritage". Through a comparative approach and voluntarily by using this term in an anachronistic way, we propose to re-examine this notion by taking into account the processes of cultural transfers and national appropriations that contribute to its making, well before this notion was used at the end of the 18th century, in connection with the foundation of museums. In other words, the notion of heritage should be approached as a shared good, at the crossroads of the history of migrations, of artists, of the diffusion of techniques, of the material circulation of works of art as well as of the taste of elites for art objects. The flowering of texts on the fine arts and, consequently, of a specific theoretical and technical terminology, is the result of intense and long-lasting exchanges between these two socio-cultural areas, which are geographically close but politically distant and sometimes in conflict, too. The diachronic investigation that ArTerm, from 1519 to 1699, intend to carry out, includes a period of two centuries which highlight the progressive shift of the centre of gravity of the arts from Rome to Paris. This period contains the development of a varied typology of artistic-literary texts, which can be subdivided into three categories: art treatises, descriptions of works, biographies and academic speeches. The project therefore aims at studying, through texts, the modalities of transfer from one language to another of the terminology of artistic theory and practice. Indeed, through the phenomena of diffusion, translation, and borrowing of Italian lexicon into French, we propose to follow the political and cultural interest of France for Italian creation, up to the triumph of French art and the "Grand Siècle", which translates a political will of emancipation from foreign influences. With a cycle of bimonthly seminars and ongoing digital training for team members, the four years project will be devoted to gathering texts and iconographic sources relating to this phenomenon, in order to document and analyze in details the described mechanisms thanks to an interoperate database of references, as well as a query interface, consenting the lexicon analysis from a semantic point of view and in translation. The ANR funding will enable this investigation to be systematised by widening the corpus taken into account to 70 writings from other fields (architecture, perspective, statuary, artists' biographies, lessons at the Academy, poetic and prose descriptions of works of art, travelogues). In the continuity of a project specifically devoted to a corpus of paintings (25 texts) in progress within the ArTerm team, this broadening appears to be essential to the investigation on artistic terminology in the modern period. The cross-study of French and Italian texts composing this artistic literature will make it possible to trace both the phenomena of translation of aesthetic theories and artistic models, and the lexicological transfers of sectorial language from one idiom to the other. The theoretical and methodological model of bi-national comparison can certainly be used in an extended investigation to different textual typologies, other periods or geographical areas. The project thus intends to take an innovative view in the fields of literature, languages and civilisations of modern Europe, to decompartmentalise knowledge in the history of art and literature, artistic techniques and collections, to provide theoretical and lexicographical tools for a precise study of the genesis of the notion of heritage, while deepening knowledge in the field of the history of the book, with a to better view on the materiality of the art works and the data available for today's restorers and conservators.