with David Eisenberg, Nicholas Fischer, and Daniel Suo

Introduction     |     3D Model     |     Sculpted Glyphs     |     Primary Sources     |     Project Narrative

Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles XElizabeth Buhe

Passing through Paris in 1815 on his way to take up his post as British consul-general in Cairo, Henry Salt (1780–1827) observed the forced restitution of the spoliated Greek and Roman antiquities that had been seized in 1797 from the Papal States by General Bonaparte.[1] He wrote from Geneva on October 7, 1815:

Nothing has produced so strong a sensation among the French as the taking away of the pictures and statues from the Louvre. This very sensible and politic measure has rendered the malignant part of the populace perfectly furious, as it at once lowers their pride in the face of the world, and will serve as an everlasting testimony of their having been conquered.[2]

As Salt noted, the French were profoundly affected by this sudden loss; Paris had in a matter of months fallen from its preeminent place as the symbolic center of history. A void—a wound, even—was left in classical antiquity’s place. History had been given material form in the Greco-Roman sculptures, which also signified the height of artistic production and the most advanced aesthetic notions of the time. The void, then, was not only visibly manifest in the emptied galleries of the Louvre, but also conceptually rooted in the disappearance of the illustrious classical past that had been appropriated for the French nation.

By penning these words in 1815 and mitigating the sentiment they expressed by later selling to the French crown the largest of the three collections he amassed in Egypt, Salt aligns the return of the Bourbon monarchy and the contingencies of its historical moment with a broadly-conceived reexamination of history, and of Egypt specifically. Beginning less than a decade after the departure of the classical papal collection, France purchased three major Egyptian collections in relatively quick succession: that of Edmé-Antoine Durand in 1824, Salt in 1826, and Bernardino Drovetti in 1827.[3] However, in 1821, just three years before the Durand purchase, the Louvre rejected a large and important Egyptian collection, an incident that speaks to the tentativeness with which this new understanding of history was being constructed: at that date, a reconceptualization of history vis-à-vis Egypt was not yet possible. With the arrival of these Egyptian antiquities in Paris, Egypt was substituted for Greece. It was a tall order for the Egyptian antiquities to meet the prestige and art-historical value of the repatriated classical artworks they replaced. Yet the terms upon which Egyptian works of art could be understood, both as historical documents and archaeological or fine art objects, had not yet been determined, nor had the very conditions for viewing them. One writer noted that these Egyptian artifacts changed the character of the Louvre: “in effect, the Museum can no longer be considered a temple of Fine Arts, but has also become that of letters and of history, a mass of customs, uses, Religions, and the science of antiquity that will there be reunited.”[4] Something fundamental about the role of the museum, and indeed of history, seemed to be changing.

Fig. 1, Map of second floor of the Louvre indicating location of the Musée Charles X’s Egyptian galleries. © Elizabeth Buhe.

The Musée Charles X, a museum of Greco-Roman and Egyptian antiquities housed within the Louvre, stood at the center of this complicated matrix of historicism, nationalism, and museum politics.[5] A royal decree of May 15, 1826 established its two separate sections and accorded four galleries for the display of each ancient civilization within an enfilade of the Cour Carrée’s south wing (fig. 1).[6] Scholar Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) was appointed curator of the Egyptian division, a position he held from 1827 until his death. There, he determined the terms on which ancient Egypt would be presented to the French public for the first time, and he did so through a complex and highly-ordered display that was broadly thematic by gallery—two funerary rooms, a room of civil life, and a room of the gods—and contained chronological series within these thematic divisions.

Champollion developed a theory of Egyptian art that was reflected both in the Musée Charles X and in the pages of his written works. Despite his curatorial work, he must first be considered a linguist and a historian; indeed, it was because of his decipherment of hieroglyphics in September 1822 that he had risen to prominence. The key to understanding ancient Egyptian writing had come with Champollion’s realization that hieroglyphic text (specifically the text outside cartouches, which hold the names of Egyptian royalty or deities) could be read phonetically rather than pictorially.[7] His expertise therefore lay in the structures of language and the conveyance of meaning through a complex web of numerous constituent parts, and his ideas about Egyptian sculpture were thus cross-disciplinary and heavily influenced by his understanding of Egyptian writing. (Until his death, he continued to return to and revise his work on hieroglyphic script as inscriptions on newly discovered monuments became available.) While this aesthetic aspect of his writing has heretofore been overshadowed by the controversy and competition surrounding the decipherment, Champollion’s theory of Egyptian art and its influence on his curatorial strategy deserves considered analysis: with his newfound ability to read the inscriptions on Egyptian antiquities, he brought the empirical thrust of the eighteenth century to bear on Egyptian history and, as a result, on its art.

In this article, I aim to provide a historical context and interpretative framework for the Musée Charles X as it existed during Champollion’s lifetime and to demonstrate that Champollion’s theory of Egyptian sculpture undergirded his display of Egyptian antiquities in the museum. I therefore focus solely on those aspects of Champollion’s approach to ancient Egypt that were freely conceptualized by him alone. Many other studies have treated the official apparatus of the Louvre and its administrators, including the politics and reception of the Musée Charles X’s ceiling paintings and décor.[8] Because Champollion was often at odds with his colleagues at the Louvre, his intellectual and curatorial approach is best understood when treated in a way that recognizes his as a singular perspective within a heterogeneous environment of competing voices.

The theory of Egyptian art that Champollion postulated was in critical dialogue with preceding and contemporaneous archaeologists, art theorists, and art historians, including Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) and Raoul Rochette (1790–1854). Most important among these thinkers, however, is Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849), one of the most prolific and influential art writers of his time. Quatremère had gained particular notoriety early in his career after winning the essay competition for the Prix Caylus of 1785 with a submission later republished under the title De l’architecture égyptienne considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque (1803), which advanced scholarship on Egyptian architecture and made Quatremère one of the foremost authorities on Egyptian art.[9] Because he wrote much more extensively on aesthetic questions than Champollion, Quatremère’s is an important voice, complementing and sometimes serving as a foil to Champollion’s theories.

While Champollion’s views diverged from those of his predecessors concerning the static nature of Egyptian artistic production, he agreed with the traditional view that Egyptian art failed to engage with the concept of the beau idéal, that synthesis of perfect forms unattainable in nature that was later perfected by the Greeks. Whereas for others this was a shortcoming warranting the dismissal of Egyptian art from the aesthetic canon, for Champollion, requiring the beau idéal from Egyptian art was simply a misguided application of a conceptual model devised for works of art made under wholly different conditions. He posed methodological questions about bringing to bear ideas “contrary to reason and to fairness each time one judges Egyptian art by taking the terms of appreciation . . . of the Greeks, which is to say those of a people entirely foreign to Egypt, not only by physical constitution but also by their customs, their political institutions, and their habits.”[10] Filtering Egyptian sculpture through Egyptian linguistic structures provided a way for Champollion to challenge the claims that Egyptian art was inferior by those who viewed it through a lens created to promote the moral and intellectual superiority of Greek sculpture. Given the insufficiency of existing structures of aesthetic valuation, Champollion turned toward both linguistics and science for guidance. In other words, Champollion was not reorienting Winckelmannian aesthetics to understand Egyptian art, but instead appropriating the language and interpretative methods of alternative disciplines.

It is notable that the two publications containing Champollion’s clearest articulations of his theory of Egyptian art both date to the same year, 1824: his Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens, and the first of his Lettres à M. le duc de Blacas d’Aulps, relatives au musée royal de Turin. Taken together, the Précis and the Lettres à M. le duc de Blacas constitute the first attempt to integrate Egyptian art with what was now a confident understanding of the complexities of the forms and structures of Egyptian writing. In fact, all three of these factors—Egyptian language, Egyptian chronology, and a measured analysis of Egyptian objects themselves—were crucial to Champollion’s theory. In particular, I argue that the hieroglyph, and Champollion’s advancement of its depth and complexity as a structure for spoken and written communication in ancient Egypt, provided a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding Egyptian sculpture.

Two years after Champollion’s decipherment, these two publications sketched out a means for applying the linguistic principles of hieroglyphics to the monuments themselves, but each to a different end. The Précis, published in April 1824, provided a detailed explication of the three elements of hieroglyphic writing (a basic alphabet of phonetic values, other partially phonetic signs, and hundreds of non-phonetic figurative and symbolic signs), a demonstration of how each functioned, and a summary of the state of the field. He published inscriptions and their translations to demonstrate how phonetic, symbolic, and figurative signs combined to create words, confirming the reliability of his system by achieving consistent results. The Précis not only asserted Champollion’s superiority over other Egyptian linguists, but it also contained a germ of his theory regarding the relationship between hieroglyphic figures and the works of art onto which they were inscribed.

Champollion wrote the first volume of his Lettres à M. le duc de Blacas in July 1824 from the Royal Museum at Turin. There, he had been studying the Egyptian collection bought by Charles Felix, King of Sardinia, from Italian antiquarian Bernardino Drovetti (1776–1852), who had been appointed French consul in Egypt by Bonaparte. It was in Turin that Champollion was confronted for the first time with a diverse set of Egyptian statues, vessels, sarcophagi, and papyri; not only could he now perform comparisons of like objects from vastly different dynasties, but he could also begin the process of analyzing each object’s inscriptions and evaluating them against his developing chronology of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. These letters reveal Champollion’s excitement and simultaneously register his realization of the wholly inadequate state of extant theories on Egyptian history and art: “it is only in the Royal Museum of Turin, amidst this mass of remains from an ancient civilization, that the history of Egyptian art seemed to me to remain entirely still to be written.”[11] Champollion’s Lettres à M. le duc de Blacas reads as a descriptive assessment of the relative placement of the Egyptian objects he scrutinized on a temporal continuum, and the primarily empirical thrust of this analytic endeavor is underscored by a chronology that appears at the end of each letter and relates to the Egyptian objects Champollion treated therein.

While the Précis and the Lettres à M. le duc de Blacas outline Champollion’s theoretical approach to Egyptian art in a primarily abstract way, his guidebook to the museum, published in 1827, as well as archival inventories, speak more concretely to his curatorial strategy. Titled Notice descriptive des monuments égyptiens du Musée Charles X, the guidebook elucidates how Champollion conceptualized grouping objects within the museum’s display by categories, such as series M, “instruments and products of the arts and crafts,” and series X, “funerary stelae.”[12] Despite its specificity in describing works of art and translating their inscriptions, the catalogue fails to indicate where these objects were placed inside the galleries of the Musée Charles X. For this we must turn to the inventories of the Durand, Salt, and Drovetti collections, which contain marginalia specifying each artifact’s precise location.[13] These inventories serve as the primary documentation for the three-dimensional, virtual model of the museum published in this article.

Champollion’s lifelong work to construct a precise history of Egyptian pharaohs would perhaps suggest his preference for a chronological approach in his display of antiquities. Yet while chronology informed his display in the cabinets of the Musée Charles X, it was not his main aim, and this article instead shows that he was deeply invested in providing a basis for the understanding of Egyptian art in its own context. In other words, Champollion sought to disavow the supremacy and indeed the relevancy of Greco-Roman norms to Egyptian art. To this end, he demonstrated the radically dissimilar functions of art in Egypt and emphasized that different means of evaluating it must be developed. This is not to assert that Champollion had all the answers, but rather to suggest that he recognized this necessity and aimed to provide a model in the Musée Charles X through which ancient Egyptian civilization could be newly understood.

Hieroglyph as Model

In putting forth his theory of Egyptian art, Champollion saw it as his first task to dispel the widespread notion that Egyptian artists were locked in a static mode of artistic production, able to reproduce only the same sculptural type despite the passage of centuries. Champollion’s entire intellectual career had been formed in the wake of the Napoleonic conquests in Egypt, and his studies were informed in particular by the engravings and written accounts of Vivant Denon’s twenty-three volume Description de l’Égypte, published between 1809 and 1829.[14] In 1798, Denon (1747–1825) had joined the Commission d’Égypte, the group of engineers and savants tasked with measuring, recording, and unveiling Egypt. In the intervening years between his return to France and the publication of the Description, Denon published his own Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte (1803), a work that, though essentially a travel journal, was itself inflected with the scientific tenor and assumption of objective realism characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expeditions. In his Voyage, Denon wrote that “Egyptians copied nature; they copied their own nature; and the Greeks only added fables to that which they stole from the Egyptians,” and even asserted that the capitals of Egyptian columns were “composed of leaves and branches of palm trees.”[15] Denon’s view that Egyptians were looking to the forms of their own country was notable, if theoretically unsophisticated, because it allowed for artistic variation and change. Because he was a member of the Commission, Denon was among the first to take a more empirical approach to evaluating Egyptian art.

In contrast to Denon’s views, the then-dominant interpretation of Egyptian art was one that had trickled down to the eighteenth century from Plato, who described Egyptian art (though in admiring terms) as the fixed product of an unchanging system of artistic laws. “It is forbidden,” he wrote, “to . . . introduce any innovation or invention . . . you will find that the things depicted or graven there ten thousand years ago (I mean what I say, not loosely but literally ten thousand years), are neither better nor worse than the productions of today; but are wrought with the same art.”[16] Winckelmann, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, was the direct inheritor of the argument for stasis in Egyptian art, though his view took into account the determining effects of climate on a people’s physiognomy and mentality.[17] Winckelmann claimed that the source of Egyptian art’s deficiency lay in the unappealing physiognomies of the Egyptian people themselves, so different from what he thought of as the physical beauty of the ancient Greeks, which he believed to be at the root of the perfection of their art. His conclusions, though, were based on a few unrepresentative examples, in contrast to Denon’s approach, which was built upon close observation of many data points. (Of all the men discussed here, only Denon had set foot in Egypt before publishing his observations.) Despite a growing body of evidence of the variety of forms in Egyptian art based on the work of the Commission, Winckelmann’s early disregard for close looking in favor of a principled aesthetic value system nevertheless continued well into the nineteenth century.[18]

Championing this disregard, Quatremère de Quincy asserted in the preamble to his 1803 De l’architecture égyptienne that “without direct knowledge gained from seeing the original [Egyptian] monuments themselves, a writer can claim to grasp sufficiently the system or genius which oversaw their creation.”[19] Indeed, despite Quatremère’s opportunistic publication of De l’architecture égyptienne just two years after the completion of the French campaign in Egypt, he stressed that his earlier 1785 work had been “conceived from a point of view and within a system of research and criticism that is in large measure independent of the positive observations the results of which the public is now awaiting.”[20] This gave him license to overtly ignore the Description’s empirical findings as irrelevant to his speculative inquiry in the second, 1803 version. Though Quatremère lamented the dearth of empirical data on Egyptian architecture, he signaled in the title of his 1803 publication a focus on its origins, principles, and taste, rather than on any factors requiring close observation, thereby eschewing archaeological exactitude.[21] Indeed, although he had traveled to Rome before the submission of his 1785 essay, the majority of his observations were reconsiderations of traditional ideas, and his sources were often textual, such as Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries (1743).[22] It is perhaps in part for this reason that Quatremère fell in line with his predecessors, claiming “the highest degree of uniformity reigns between [Egyptian sculptures],” which show no perceptible signs of advancement despite the immense intervals of time during which they were produced.[23] Moreover, “even among so many examples of Egyptian sculpture,” Quatremère wrote, “everything nevertheless seems to be the work of a single manufacturer . . . nothing indicates the varied styles of the epochs nor changes in taste, nor the smallest of steps toward true imitation, nor toward the study of the human body.”[24]

Thus Quatremère carried into the nineteenth century the view of Egyptian sculpture as stagnant, monumental, and uninventive, a position most forcefully brought to Champollion’s moment by the archaeologist Raoul Rochette. Though he was curator of antiquities at the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris, Rochette likewise had few works at hand upon which to base his conclusions, since at this time the Bourbon monarchy had yet to make any major Egyptian acquisitions, and the library contained primarily numismatic antiquities. In his Considérations sur le caractère des arts de l’antique Égypte (1823), Rochette propagated a vision of Egyptian artists as so imprisoned by their strict religious beliefs that they were capable only of mechanically executing figures that were characterized by a sterility of invention.[25] For him, Egyptian sculptures “always have the same traits, the same physiognomy, the same age, the same sex; in a word, it is always the same person, not portraits of different people . . . [the Egyptians] never represented man from nature, but only a conventional figure . . . because they saw in all of Egypt only one Egyptian.”[26]

In this same vein was a decision about the potential acquisition of the Thédenant-Duvent collection solicited in 1821 by the minister of the interior from a committee assembled for that purpose, which concluded that it would be unwise to

multiply in our museums the number of Egyptian statues and sculptures, because art for the Egyptians never approached the degree of perfection to which it was elevated for the Greeks and in our modern times, [Egyptian sculptures] seem to have stayed stationary . . . devoid of all expression with their sharp, cramped, stocky forms, [and] their immobile and uniform poses.[27]

It was against such denunciations of creativity on the part of Egyptian artists and of variety in their artworks that Champollion took up his pen in 1824. Champollion was quick to critique what he viewed as Winckelmann’s superficial approach and accused him of unjust conclusions drawn from a paucity of Egyptian monuments in Europe, which consisted of, “for the most part, only some of the crudest catacombs.”[28] Champollion’s reproach begins to reveal a fundamental divergence in his theoretical position toward Egyptian art vis-à-vis his contemporaries. Brought to Egyptian antiquities via linguistics, precision of detail was crucial to his intellectual practice. While working to decipher hieroglyphics, the accuracy of drawings and engravings of monuments, particularly their inscriptions, was of the utmost importance; it was for this reason that Champollion often lamented the inexactitude of the hieroglyphic characters published in the plates of the Description.[29] From his close observation of Egyptian sculpture, Champollion held that it did indeed exhibit widely divergent formal differentiations. He wrote:

[this] group of Egyptian statues from the Drovetti collection proves above all else, and against general opinion, that Egyptian artists were not at all held to slavishly imitating a small number of primitive types, giving to each person they represented, whether gods or simple mortals, a conventional model that was always the same.[30]

Fig. 2, Ramsès II, Lettres et journaux de Champollion, vol. 2, Lettres et journaux écrites pendant le voyage d’Égypte (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1909), 98ff.

For Champollion, as for Denon, Egyptian artists were indeed looking to nature. Bolstered in this belief by his translations of each sculpture’s hieroglyphic inscriptions, Champollion increasingly could correlate given works with historical figures, leading him to believe that—at least to some extent—a face could be a signifier of individual identity. “We are struck,” he wrote, “by the extreme variety of physiognomies [of these sculptures],” which nonetheless shared a kind of “air de famille.”[31] His voyage to Egypt in 1828 further confirmed these views, as he described a colossal head of Ramesses II, which he also sketched in his notebook:

His physiognomy was sufficient for me to recognize him as a statue of Sesostris [Ramesses II], since it was by and large the most faithful portrait of the beautiful Sestrosis at Turin; the inscriptions on the arms, the pectoral, and the belt confirmed my conjecture, and there is no longer any doubt that there exists, at Turin and at Memphis, two portraits of the greatest of pharaohs (fig. 2).[32]

To Champollion, Egyptian artists “were endeavoring to imitate the forms that they had beneath their very eyes.”[33] These faces were, then, more generally, Egyptian faces, exhibiting the characteristic traits of the Egyptian race.

Though he clearly saw variety in the faces of Egyptian sculpture, Champollion concurrently acknowledged a certain uniformity in their poses; the naturalism he identified was contained within in a set of representational boundaries. The body was most often “simple and severe,” constituting a sculptural typology; however, it was a type distinct from that “prétendu type obligé” he found fault with in others’ writings, because the sculpture’s face was still able to signal divergence from the supposed unchanging model through its manifestation of the natural difference brought about by observation.[34] The variation of faces allowed Champollion to posit a certain degree of representational verity as central to Egyptian sculpture’s adaptability over time. Concurrently, he could claim that all Egyptian sculptures fell into a general typology, or set of formal limits. What resulted was a kind of hybrid model in which a minimal amount of change was permissible within the relative rigidity of the figure’s pose.

Champollion’s engagement with the concept of type found its most immediate corollary in Quatremère’s theory of Egyptian architecture. In De l’architecture égyptienne, Quatremère rejected the longstanding argument of Vitruvius, later canonized by the Abbé Laugier in 1755, that all architecture sprang from the unique model of the primitive wooden hut. Instead, Quatremère fragmented this monogenetic model by theorizing three separate “types” that developed simultaneously rather than having evolved from each other chronologically. These types were the cave, the tent, and the wooden hut, which corresponded respectively with Egyptian, Chinese, and Greek civilizations. Drawing upon the eighteenth-century understanding of language as comprised of universal grammatical principles, Quatremère set out to prove that Greek architecture was not a derivative of Egyptian architecture, stating, “the invention of architecture must be seen as parallel to the invention of language. That is to say that neither one nor the other invention can be attributed to any man because both are attributes of men.”[35] While the three typologies of architecture—the cave, the tent, and the wooden hut—developed in parallel, in Quatremère’s opinion only the Greek hut had possessed the potential to advance, through imitation, into a noble art. For him, only Greek artists had worked in a context that permitted intellectual development. While more traditional theories of mimesis simply depended on the reproduction of a model, and thus allowed for a certain degree of stasis, Quatremère’s theory replaced nature with intellect, stressing the importance of change and transformation. According to Quatremère, stagnant civilizations, like those of China and Egypt, had not been provided with adequate conditions for artistic advancement, while in Greece progress had been enabled by social and political systems based on freedom and popular democracy. Egypt’s impediment to development was perceived to be an effect of the conflation of its governmental and religious institutions; the doctrines of Egyptian religion demanded rigid representational rules.

While Quatremère provided one of the clearest articulations of this view, it was in fact widespread and informed the positions of other writers, including Winckelmann and Rochette. Champollion also believed that the strict nature of Egyptian religious dogma had been a limiting factor in Egyptian representation, and it was in part to this cause that he ascribed the uniform pose among Egyptian sculptures.[36] Just as geographic and climatic conditions were contributing factors to a country’s primitive architectural type, they were also seen to affect the development of that country’s arts and languages. Therefore, Champollion (following Winckelmann) held that in addition to being constrained by national institutions, the characteristic immobility of Egyptian sculpture was reinforced by the conditions of Egypt’s hot climate, which necessitated a habitual state of “calm and restfulness” in its people, as exemplified in its statues.[37]

Crucial to Champollion’s understanding of Egyptian art was that he continued to consider it alongside Egypt’s civic and religious institutions. A key component of Champollion’s theory of Egyptian art was his recognition that it did not function as a composite reconstitution of the perfect and most beautiful forms of nature through the intellectual intervention of the artist, as was understood to be the case for classical sculpture:

Finally, if one is surprised to not notice in these Egyptian statues, these graceful or sublime forms that the chisel of the Greeks knew how to forge out of the most precious marbles or the most common materials, it is because we incessantly forget that the Egyptians looked to copy nature as their country revealed it to them, whereas the Greeks tended to and succeeded in embellishing and modifying it according to an ideal type that their genius knew how to invent.[38]

Hence, for Champollion, Egyptian art did not engage with the concept of the beau idéal, that unified vision residing only in the mind of the artist—essentially Champollion was in agreement with Quatremère on this point. But for Champollion, Egyptian art, created by a wholly different people, did not serve the same functions that Greek art did. It was therefore unjust to submit it to the same kind of aesthetic evaluation.[39] Yet Egyptian art still conformed to its own typology, one that, despite its art’s capacity for naturalism through the sculpted face, was also generalized and abstracted from nature just as Greek sculpture was.

This notion of type could be extrapolated, of course, beyond a discussion of architecture. If the cave, the tent, and the hut were the primitive typologies of architecture, the equivalent basic archetype of representational art—most significantly for our discussion of sculpture—was the hieroglyph.[40] As mimetic symbols, hieroglyphs held a privileged place at the nexus of art and language and were therefore of critical interest to Enlightenment thinkers as they turned toward the study of originary structures. Many eighteenth-century writers were influenced by The Divine Legation of Moses by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, published in 1741 (and translated into French three years later), which contained a lengthy discussion of hieroglyphs.[41] He was the first to overturn the perceived mysticism of hieroglyphic writing, which had been understood as a symbolic structure created by a priestly cast to conceal knowledge, and instead argued that it was an original, and public, form of communication. Further, Warburton posed hieroglyphics as a veritable language even though each individual character was but a representation, and he acknowledged the minimal abstraction between each hieroglyph and the object in nature to which it referred. Therefore the hieroglyph was a mysterious but decipherable symbol, albeit one that only had the capacity to call to mind a limited number of objects or ideas, as suggested by its mimetic nature. 

The typology of the hieroglyph was important for Champollion’s understanding of Egyptian art, but again it was Quatremère who wrote most lucidly on the relationship of the hieroglyph to sculpture. Quatremère’s theory, which he published in 1805 as a series of articles in the Archives littéraires and the Moniteur universel, is striking in that it proposes the hieroglyph as the single and original type for mimetic sculpture in Egypt as well as in Greece. Such a view was in contrast to the three architectural typologies he proposed in De l’architecture égyptienne, because it necessarily suggested the transference of sculptural form from one civilization to the next.[42] The hieroglyph allowed Quatremère to discuss at length his theory of imitation, which these 1805 articles put in perspective as a refutation of the realism characteristic of art produced under the Napoleonic Empire and of Toussaint-Bernard Éméric-David’s Recherches sur l’art statuaire, published in the same year.[43]

For Quatremère, the hieroglyph exemplified the most ideal kind of imitation because it was not a simple copying of nature—which he called “particular or individual imitation”—such as a portrait, but rather was based on an abstract idea of a thing, which, as a conceptualization, had never been given physical or tangible form in the world. As he put it,

the hieroglyphic trait of a man, for example, does not show him in relation to the individual, nor in relation to space, but only by the idea of these relationships. It is a non-imitative imitation, which is only suited to the most general of appearances and forms of people or bodies: hieroglyphic imitation is consequently the most general imitation.[44]

As an initial site of the generalized form, according to Quatremère, the hieroglyph provided a framework for abstraction on which Greek artists could base their own model of ideal imitation. Because imitation of the individual man was “vulgar,” and it was only by “generalizing this image by imitation from nature” that one could create an ideal, the hieroglyph was a powerful conceptual tool that acted as an antidote against the slavish copying of natural forms.[45]

Since antiquity, Quatremère noted, ancient authors such as Pausanias and Strabo had equated the primitive style of Greek sculpture with that of Egyptian sculpture. For Quatremère, the possibility for an artist to leave behind the original, rudimentary type and break free of its limits by productive, intellectual imitation was always tied to societal conditions. This was as true for the hieroglyphic type as it had been for Quatremère’s three typologies of architecture. Because the hieroglyph was born in Egypt, and that country’s oppressive institutions—he called them “religious shackles”—forbade any alteration to the meaning attributed to each hieroglyphic signifier, Egyptian sculpture’s potential for adaptability over time, as well as any semblance of artistic freedom, was blocked.[46] Moreover, in Quatremère’s opinion, Egyptian art could not take on any loftier purpose than the one it already had: conveying through abstracted mimesis the idea of the thing in nature that it signified. In Greece, on the other hand, where the hieroglyph as type was released of its function as a signifier—while retaining its valence as an abstracted imitation—the generalized hieroglyphic beings became images of people who were “imaginary in reality but real for the imagination.”[47] Necessarily, these figures of the ideal style could only be notional; once the original meaning of the hieroglyph had been left behind, imitation in Greece took on its role as an intellectual reconstitution of the ideal. The sign itself was replaced “with another order,” a new world of ideas, which could be “embellished at will.”[48]

Champollion appropriated this typology of the hieroglyph in order to refute the very conclusions Quatremère drew from it. For Quatremère, the hieroglyphic type was the generalized, abstracted ideal, whereas Egyptian sculpture itself was ignoble: “the flaw of imitation, which forms the base of the Egyptian system, consists of too great a similarity with that which served as its model.”[49] It thus risked approaching, in Quatremère’s view, “similitude” or reality, which, in attempting to reproduce the thing itself, rested entirely outside the realm of artistic production.[50] Champollion’s proposition that the Egyptian sculptural figure was a generalized, abstracted sculptural type challenged Quatremère’s assertion that Egyptian art tried to recreate reality. More importantly, however, Champollion opposed Quatremère’s use of hieroglyphic typology to condemn Egyptian art by attacking the very premise upon which Quatremère’s theory was built. Specifically, in Quatremère’s use of the hieroglyph, Champollion found fault with the superficiality of Quatremère’s explication of how the hieroglyph conveyed meaning in the Egyptian context, and therefore—consequently and more concretely—the relationship between the hieroglyph as linguistic signifier and sculptural form. To level this critique, Champollion proposed his own theory based on the notion of the hieroglyph as type in which he made explicit the direct analogy between sculpture and the hieroglyph as a carrier of meaning:

Sculpture and painting were never in Egypt anything but veritable branches of writing. Their imitation had only to be pushed up until a certain point; a statue was in reality but a simple sign, a true character of writing; and so, as soon as the artist had rendered with care and truth the traits of the person whose idea he wished to recall . . . his goal was from that moment achieved: the arms, the torso, the legs, all considered accessory parts, were quite neglected, because to execute their completion to a perfect finish would not have added anything to their value nor to the real clarity of the sign.[51]

By equating sculpture with language generally and written signs specifically, Champollion opened up the possibility of an interpretative position based upon the complexities and nuances of the hieroglyphic script, which he had definitively sketched out in his Précis the same year.[52] The sculpture’s static pose contributed to its status as a hieroglyphic type, but, within the limits of this typology and like individual hieroglyphic characters themselves, each sculpture also possessed the capacity for nearly innumerable variation through its facial composition.[53] Sculptures, furthermore, like hieroglyphs, were capable of conveying divergent meanings, and the way they did so correlated with the three different kinds of hieroglyphic characters—the figurative, the symbolic, and the phonetic—and their functions as Champollion had identified them in his Précis.

The first of these, figurative characters, offered near-exact contours, and often colors, of the real objects that they imitated. As the simplest form, they conveyed the idea of the thing they represented, such as star, turtle, bread, and moon. Figurative characters were limited in their expressive capacity because they were restricted to signifying only concrete items, to “the simple notation of several isolated ideas, and cannot, in any case . . . express man’s many relationships with external objects, nor the various relationships between these objects.”[54] This type of hieroglyphic character, which held the capacity to express only “purely physical beings, but not one abstract idea” was the one upon which Quatremère had built his hieroglyphic theory. Indeed, the understanding of the hieroglyph as a solely figurative character was commonplace in the eighteenth century and was perpetuated, for instance, by the categorization of the hieroglyph alongside heraldic (“blazon”) and ideal characters in Diderot and D’Alembert’s “Système figuré des connaissances humaines” in the Encyclopédie.[55] Champollion associated the figurative character with the art of painting, thereby positioning himself within a long line of historical thought that posited pictures as the original, pre-linguistic, form of communication.[56] This view was upheld by Champollion’s observation that in Egypt the same spoken words, which had preserved their ancient meanings, expressed the verbs “to paint” and “to write”; the nouns “writing” and “painting”; and the appellations “scribe” and “painter.”[57] Like figurative characters, Egyptian painting had the ability to portray things only in an “instantaneous manner,” because it was unable to express abstract ideas such as time.[58] In tomb paintings, for example, Champollion noted that depictions of animals were shown only in profile, a mode of representation that could “be accounted for by [the image’s] intended goal: the art of drawing was not generally used except as a means of writing; it was driven in principle by the question of giving form.”[59] Some Egyptian art, according to Champollion, belonged to this simplest mode of representation, including paintings depicting scenes of private life, bas-reliefs, and images of single individuals.[60]

Champollion’s true innovation, however, lay in his identification of two other types of hieroglyphic characters: the symbolic and the phonetic. It was in these characters that the hieroglyph’s ideational capacity resided. By building on this point, Champollion was able to postulate a theory that took Egyptian art beyond the realm of simple imitation into the conceptual realm of writing and thought. It was in this sense that he made the significant claim that Egyptian art “devoted itself to the notation of ideas rather than to the representation of things.”[61] Symbolic characters expressed objects or ideas not embodied in the hieroglyphic form itself, but related by associative principles.[62] Meaning thus proceeded through synecdoche, the use of the part for the whole; by metonymy, the substitution of one object for another with which it is closely related (“cause for effect”); and by metaphor, the application of a term to an unrelated object to suggest a resemblance.[63] Examples include two arms holding a bow and an arc to signify battle (synecdoche), the crescent moon to signify month (metonymy), or the bee to express “a people obeying their king” (metaphor).[64] It was particularly in the categories of metonymy and metaphor that the conceptual gained entry into hieroglyphic writing. Phonetic characters, however, more evidently than symbolic ones, unequivocally proved the capability of hieroglyphic writing to express abstract principles. As the most frequently employed type of character, they were, as in many other languages, alphabetic, and allowed Egyptian writing to stretch to express “a certain order of ideas” not constrained by the parameters of merely representational signs.[65]

The capacity of the hieroglyph to hold concepts based on its relationship to other individual characters was crucial to Champollion’s theory of Egyptian art. Stringing together hieroglyphs in a certain syntagmatic order conveyed meaning so that a hieroglyph’s signification was clearest when situated among other hieroglyphic signs.[66] As Champollion put it, invoking the notion of hieroglyphic type,

the imitation of physical objects, pushed only up to a certain point, was sufficient for the proposed goal; a more sustained effort in its execution would have added nothing to the clarity nor the expression desired of the painted or sculpted image, [it was] a true sign of writing, almost always tied to a vast composition of which it was itself but one single element [emphasis added].[67]

Here Champollion speaks of the sculpted object just as much as he speaks of the hieroglyph; it was his discovery of the hieroglyph’s phonetic and metaphorical capacities that allowed him to transpose the significance of meaning between written signs to that between sculpted ones.[68] For Champollion, Egyptian sculpture’s primary importance lay in its ability to tell the history of its people. Each statue was but a single sign embedded in a chain of signs, and meaning was conveyed as a fabric of signification, such that the differences between sculptural signs arranged in relation to each other could convey, for example, a pharaonic chronology. Champollion had proven that neither history nor conceptual thought were excluded in ancient Egypt.

Figurative, symbolic, and phonetic characters were consistently combined, Champollion summarized in his Précis, “in the same text, in the same sentence, I would say almost in the same word.”[69] In treating the hieroglyph as nothing more than a primitive sculptural type, Quatremère’s theory failed to take into account the hieroglyph’s function as a linguistic sign within a syntagmatic structure that existed to convey meaning. As Quatremère put it, “because it was the nature of [the hieroglyph’s] use to indicate nothing more than objects, it was also the nature of its form to make visible only the most general relationships.”[70] Instead, Champollion showed that hieroglyphic writing functioned akin to the words of a sentence, capable of expressing “the most metaphysical ideas, the most delicate nuances of language, inflections, and all grammatical forms.”[71]

Champollion’s theory had its limits: he remained unclear on several points, including the particulars of his abstract hieroglyphic “type,” which for Quatremère had been so well ideated. Moreover, Champollion did not match the phonetic character’s function with any kind of artwork, so that it was instead left to operate conceptually as the overarching possibility for abstract thought as embodied in grammatical structure. Finally, the precise role of the disjunction between a sculpture’s naturalistic face and monolithic body remained underdeveloped. Despite these shortcomings, Champollion had posited the crucial notion that Egyptian sculpture signified best not when isolated as a rarefied aesthetic object, but rather when situated among other like works. At its simplest, Champollion’s key insight was to treat sculptural form as sign rather than as representation. This, in turn, allowed for interpretation based on the notion that signs can be constituted only in relation to other signs. Importantly, this syntagmatic property could operate on two levels: one that sought to illuminate chronological correlations between Egyptian sculptures, and one that made visible a fabric of multidirectional contextual links among Egyptian artifacts. In this, Champollion took vital steps toward postulating a theory of Egyptian art that obviated the use of a model for evaluating Greek sculpture in favor of one that strove to understand Egyptian sculpture in terms born of Egyptian structures of thought and communication.

Chains of Meaning

Champollion’s museum invented a history of Egyptian art for the French public where none had existed before, and did so through the dual strategies of theme and chronology. Crucially, image and text were one and the same for Champollion, not only in the sense explored above, whereby artwork was equated with signifier, but also insofar as many Egyptian antiquities bore inscriptions, therefore doubling as philological documents. Writing on the occasion of the Musée Charles X’s opening in 1827, Egyptologist Nestor L’Hôte (1804–1842) best characterized the shift evinced by Champollion’s curatorial project:

Until now, the collections of Egyptian monuments, formed with the goal of illuminating the history of art, of studying the method of sculpture and painting of different peoples and following its progress, could be classified only according to the order of their materials, in some way, arbitrarily. Here, since it is a matter of illuminating the entire history of Egypt, M. Champollion has had to consider at the same time both the subject of each monument and its specific use, and determine, with this knowledge, the place reserved for it; it was necessary to display, as completely as possible, the series of gods and of sovereigns, and to classify methodically all the objects related to the public and private lives of the Egyptians; in this way all the civil and religious monuments will be systematically reunited.[72]

Upon entering the Musée Charles X, the visitor was confronted with four galleries, each characterized by a broad theme. (Only objects of small sizes were exhibited in Champollion’s four second-floor galleries, while monumental Egyptian sculptures were displayed on the Louvre’s ground floor directly underneath the Musée Charles X.)[73] Traversing the rooms east to west from the museum’s point of entry at the escalier de la colonnade at the southeast corner of the Cour Carrée, he or she first encountered a funerary room, then a room of civil life, followed by another funerary room, and finally, a room of the gods, at which point the suite of galleries opened up onto the salle des colonnes, a shared space between the Greco-Roman and Egyptian divisions of the Musée Charles X.

The interpretation of Champollion’s strategy of display that follows seeks to illuminate the sophistication of his conceptualization of Egyptian society, which informed his means of exhibiting it in the Musée Charles X. His was a museography that allowed the chronological, thematic, and iconographical aspects of Egyptian art simultaneously to be addressed and affirmed as worthy.

Launch the 3D Model of Champollion's Exhibition

Passing through the arched doorway from the first gallery into the second, the visitor encountered objects of Egyptian daily life. Antiquities labeled with stickers corresponding to categories laid out in the Notice descriptive and designated by letters of the alphabet were grouped in seven tall display cases along the room’s perimeter and two small vitrines placed in window alcoves. Significantly for a room meant to display civil life, the armoires on either side of the doorway contained primarily statues and amulets representing Egyptian kings and queens (series D) from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Dynasties, and each also included at least one Twenty-Sixth Dynasty sovereign. In effect, Champollion was positing a chronology of Egyptian rulers in this gallery that suggested, straightaway, the prominence and relevancy of these royal figures in the daily lives of ordinary Egyptians. These two armoires, filled with dozens of statues of different Egyptian rulers, enabled Champollion to put forth a diachronic history of Egypt within his larger thematic divisions (fig. 3). Moreover, he definitively demonstrated the variability of Egyptian sculpture within a broader figural type to prove the point on which he disagreed with his predecessors and contemporaries, who insisted on Egyptian artists’ servile and stagnant imitation of primitive forms. Champollion believed that the facial characteristics of different rulers were plainly reflected by Egyptian artists in their sculptures, which he sought to demonstrate in these cabinets by bringing together a wide chronological spectrum of pharaohs.

Fig. 3, Screenshot of virtual model of the Musée Charles X, salle civile, showing cabinets 1, 2, and 7.

Proceeding clockwise through the room of civil life, the visitor would next be presented with a large wall cabinet containing funerary images (series Q), figurines of ordinary Egyptians (series G), domestic utensils (series L), and products of the arts and crafts (series M). Having already set the stage by presenting Egyptian kings on both sides of the gallery’s entryway, Champollion here turned to members of diverse Egyptian classes, ranging from a temple guardian (N864) to a member of the priestly cast (N1575). Other objects in this cabinet related to the functions of the people represented within it; for example, a bronze vase (N908) pictures the son of the deceased priest-scribe Chapochonsis performing funerary duties, while a scribe’s writing palette (N3014) offers visual testimony to his occupation.

Of particular interest in this cabinet of the salle civile are a series of ushabtis or funerary figurines (such as N2965), whose hieroglyphic inscriptions allowed Champollion to identify precisely the individuals depicted (often the same person was represented by multiple figurines, as the ushabtis functioned as substitutes for the deceased, in case he or she was asked to perform manual labor in the afterlife). Grouping these works together allowed Champollion again to exhibit the variety of form among a like type, and also to show the same Egyptian individual sculpted in varying materials and by the hand of different artists. In his Notice descriptive, Champollion wrote extensively about ushabtis, noting that they

usually contain the proper name and line of descent of an individual, and moreover, the indication of the public function that the deceased had fulfilled in his lifetime; one can therefore, in bringing together with care this genre of monuments, which, at first glance, offers so little variety, form a sequence of the highest interest, because, in classing them according to the indications given by their inscriptions, one can recompose the series of casts, that of public functions, and in a word a faithful picture of the social organization of Egyptians. Such care was taken in the creation of these figurines that a large number among them genuinely offer the portrait of the person to whom they were consecrated.[74]

What is striking about this passage is that it appears toward the end of the Notice descriptive in a chapter devoted to the description of objects shown in the funerary rooms, where similar ushabtis were on display. In the salle civile, however, Champollion took ushabtis out of their funerary context to demonstrate a cross-section of Egyptian society by exhibiting individuals of varying socioeconomic classes. A similar strategy of display is evident in Champollion’s second funerary room, where he mixed objects from non-funerary groups (such as a model of a bed from series M, “instruments and products of the arts and crafts”) as if pulling together artifacts that would convey the function and appearance of a tomb. An artwork’s signification within Champollion’s display, then, was not limited strictly to its intended function in ancient Egyptian society or theology. Instead, each object’s meaning was variable based on the conditions of those objects around it, and according to Champollion’s specific curatorial intent in any one section of the Musée Charles X.

Fig. 4, Table of Contents, Notice descriptive des monuments égyptiens du Musée Charles X (Paris: Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1827), vii-viii.

Continuing through the room of civil life in a clockwise direction, the visitor would encounter cabinets dedicated to articles of clothing and personal care (cabinet 3), domestic utensils (cabinet 4), instruments of the cult and products of the arts and crafts (cabinets 5 and 6), and Egyptian kings, as already discussed (cabinet 7). The categories in which Champollion classified the Louvre’s Egyptian artifacts appear to have helped him conceptualize their display by cabinet, since as a general practice he seems to have grouped objects of several distinct, but often related, series into one cabinet, rather than indiscriminately mixing objects from all categories in a given display. Champollion also imposed further classification within these series. Take, for instance, series M, “instruments and products of the arts and crafts” in the room of civil life. It is broken down into subdivisions entitled “weapons,” “musical instruments,” “objects related to agriculture,” “hunting and fishing,” etc. The sequence of a given series across cabinets in any one gallery did not necessarily follow the sequential order of series Champollion laid out in the guidebook (fig. 4). Nor did series follow one another in alphabetical order. Instead, the juxtaposition of one series with another seems to have been based on a conceptual relationship rather than on the objects’ materials or the visual appeal of the display. “Everything will pass successively under the eyes of spectators,” Champollion wrote, “and each object, set in relation with those of the same class, will take on new interest” [emphasis added].[75] Through developing and juxtaposing categories of like objects, Champollion privileged the contextual relationships between objects over their unique formal or functional properties.

In a note written during his voyage to Egypt in 1828, Champollion observed that it is “through nomenclature that one has managed to sort out the chaos of creation; to avoid confusion it has been necessary to first arrange each object according to the relationships which exist between them, then to group them according to their relationships by genre, by species, by family; one has thus gone down to the individual, even to chemical analysis.”[76] Champollion’s divisions and subdivisions, conceptually drawn from a Linnaean taxonomic system of classification, were determined according to the use or representational value of each object. The categories Champollion devised were often shown in close proximity to each other in the museum, facilitating comparison between them.[77]

As L’Hôte noted in the quotation cited at the beginning of this section (see also n. 72), the scientific rigor of Champollion’s approach was newly brought to bear on his display of Egyptian antiquities in the Musée Charles X. Yet in his endeavor to make sense of the artifacts of Egyptian civilization, Champollion assumed a place in a long line of scholars seeking to order antiquity. Many before him had published “paper museums” or multi-volume books pairing texts with engravings. Champollion’s thematic gallery designations—funerary rites, civil life, and Egyptian gods—recalled the functional order in which the five-volume L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures was structured. This work, published by the French Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741) between 1719 and 1724, featured sections pertaining to the gods, cults, customs of private and civil life, and funerals and tombs.[78] Montfaucon’s aim was to produce a firm relationship between text and image; the antiquities served primarily to supplement a priori notions of ancient history.[79] Several decades later, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Caylus (1692–1765) recommended a construction of history that privileged the primacy of the object in his seven-volume Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises. In the first volume of this series, begun in 1752, Caylus articulated the shift from an approach like that of Montfaucon to one of close observation:

When I began to engrave this collection, I first had in mind the man of letters who seeks in monuments only their relations with the testimony of the ancients. I seized on these relations when they presented themselves naturally and when they seemed clear and evident to me; but being neither a scholar nor patient enough always to use this method, I often preferred another way that will perhaps be of interest to those who love the arts. It consists in studying faithfully the mind and hand of the artist, penetrating his views, following him in their execution, and, in a word, looking at monuments as the proof and expression of the taste that reigns in a century and in a country.[80]

Fig. 5, Frontispiece, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines, et gauloises (Paris: N. M. Tilliard, 1759), vol. 3.

Caylus proposed an approach based on close looking, one that would reach beyond the chronology of events and actions, but he also suggested that it would reflect the whims of the amateur. At issue was the methodological question of reconciling external evidence with a work of art’s internal, formal characteristics, a reconciliation that, in the case of Egyptian antiquities, was impossible to achieve before Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics. The Recueil d’antiquités can thus be seen as occupying a liminal space between the impulse for empirical exactitude and its achievement, a misalignment echoed by the ambiguity apparent in the frontispiece to Caylus’s third volume (fig. 5). In it, winged men who represent time attend an Egyptian goddess, hardly visible amidst swaths of billowing fabric. It is unclear if they are pulling away or straining to hold up these weighty folds with the brute strength of their sculpted muscles. The ambiguity of the action resonates in the accompanying explication: “The frontispiece represents Antiquity, in the form of an Egyptian figure, prodigious in size, covered by an immense veil, pulled back by [the spirits of] time who rush in, and use all their efforts to hide and obscure her.”[81] In depicting this simultaneous veiling and unveiling, the artist alludes not only to the allegorical meaning of time (which allows glimpses of the past while also obscuring it), but also suggests the impossibility of a full revelation of Egyptian antiquity within the Recueil d’antiquités’s pages.

It is tempting to see Champollion’s curatorial project as a synthesis of the antiquarian and proto-archaeological practices that preceded him; indeed, it is striking that for Champollion one did not necessarily come at the exclusion of the other. In part, what is so compelling about Champollion’s curatorial strategy and therefore his museum is that it envisioned a presentation of Egypt that at once valued chronology, iconography, and the themes or categories that would allow access to understanding ancient Egyptian societal, cultural, and theological structures. Therefore, Champollion proffered not a closed system but a radically open one that was constructed to accommodate additions and shifts in knowledge. The web of signification that Champollion built was generous and malleable, and it was conceived as both a system of classification based on material evidence and as a conceptual construct. On an abstract level, any future modifications meant the possibility of inserting, for example, a newly-recognized pharaoh into the chronology or a god into the pantheon; on the most tangible level it meant the possibility of adding or removing antiquities from the armoires of the Musée Charles X, which served as a simulacrum of a wider body of knowledge about ancient Egypt.

Scholars could continue to build upon and amend the field of Egyptology, which would, in Champollion’s view, reach an increased state of precision within his broadly-conceived categories of knowledge. In fact, his travels in Egypt following the inauguration of the Musée Charles X were largely consumed by the goal of verifying, through the study of inscriptions, the propositions he made in the museum about the structure of ancient Egyptian civilization, and, in his Lettres à M. le duc de Blacas of 1824, about pharaonic chronology: “Egyptian monuments lend themselves much better than those of the Greeks and Romans to a scientific and methodical classification. Each object always bears an original inscription which indicates without uncertainty its intent and its use.”[82] In claiming for Egyptian art the clarity of scientific rigor, Champollion demonstrated its distance from the biases of aesthetic tradition. He sought recourse in other fields of thought—particularly linguistics, as described above, and science—to develop a new means of interpreting Egyptian art.

The other crucial aspect of Champollion’s travels in Egypt was to provide evidence for the debate about the influence of Egypt on Greek art and vice versa. Writing on his return journey in 1829, Champollion claimed that he had copied down in his notebook monuments of the highest interest because of the proof they offered for the “general history of fine arts, and in particular, for their transmission from Egypt to Greece.”[83] He put it even more strongly earlier that year in a forceful denial of the influence of Greek art on Egypt: “Egyptian art owes to no one but itself all that it has produced that is great, pure, and beautiful.” Thereby, he wrote, “the arts began in Greece as the result of servile imitation of Egyptian arts . . .  Ancient Egypt educated Greece in the arts which contributed to the most sublime development: but without Egypt, Greece would probably never have become the classical civilization of fine arts that it is.”[84] Champollion’s ardent claims about the unidirectionality of artistic influence between Egypt and Greece reinforced his belief in the insufficiency and irrelevancy of the extant systems of understanding and aesthetic evaluation of Greco-Roman antiquities for Egyptian artifacts. His letters from Egypt are, in this sense, yet another assertion of the fundamental differences between the two cultures, and the necessity of developing a means by which to look at the art of ancient Egypt on its own terms.[85]

Asserting Egypt’s artistic independence from Greece took on particular urgency in the context of the Louvre, where Champollion’s Egyptian galleries opened directly into the four Greco-Roman ones accorded to the comte Frédéric de Clarac (1777–1847), curator of sculpture and antiquities at the Louvre. The optimal condition for viewing Egyptian antiquities, Champollion realized, was not as isolated objects of sublime beauty, but, as discussed, contextualized among related objects, which would lend them meaning.[86] Champollion’s decisions for the display of Egyptian artifacts in the museum were undergirded by a new understanding—impossible before the decipherment of hieroglyphics—that recognized that art in Egypt most often served a functional, rather than aesthetic, role. His curation in the Musée Charles X not only allowed individual objects to be read according to their particular use, but also painted a broad picture of Egyptian society and its customs that made explicit the uniqueness of this early civilization and made implicit its distinctness from ancient Greece.[87]

Perhaps the clearest articulation challenging the assumption of the Greek ideal as the model of artistic perfection came from Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), whose writings on Winckelmann’s theories were conceived toward the end of the eighteenth century, but were not published until the end of the nineteenth. Herder’s words could very well have been those of Champollion:

The Egyptians are older than the Greeks, and would have to be judged not according to them, but from within themselves: What was art for them? How did they, in their old age, develop it? And what was its meaning? – If they, in all these matters, had nothing in common with the Greeks, you should not place the works of both within one framework, but let each serve its place and its time: because originally the Egyptians would probably neither have wanted to work for the Greeks nor for us.[88]

To hold Egyptian art to the hitherto dominant Hellenic standard would be to always condemn it to failure, as Champollion—who noted that “the genius of these people [the Greeks and the Egyptians] exhibited itself in essentially different ways”—realized.[89] Significantly, Champollion’s early role in determining new viewing conditions for these works of art was made possible in the 1820s, in the midst of Restoration France, where the supremacy of the male nude had broken down and new modes of representation and visuality were urgently being sought. Thus freed of the moralizing and intellectualizing imperatives thrust upon it by the structures built for the evaluation of Greek sculpture, Egyptian art could, in the Musée Charles X, not only be evaluated on its own terms, but could also constitute a different way of looking at, and thinking about, history. 

Conclusion

While Champollion’s museum was innovative in its remarkably sophisticated treatment of Egyptian civilization, the motivation to bring alive the art of a past beyond that of ancient Greece and Rome was part of a larger trend toward historicism whose roots predated the nineteenth century.[90] Relevant in the present context is not this historical impulse as such, but more specifically its material manifestation in the Louvre, an institution bound up with notions of erudite taste and the officially-sanctioned canon of the beaux arts. Following the ruptures of the Revolution, the rise and fall of the Empire, and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, conditions were such in 1820s Paris that the Louvre could both collect and display objects from periods in the history of art previously considered barbaric.[91]

As suggested in the introduction, the French crown’s rejection of the first Drovetti collection in 1821 points to the contingencies of the moment: it was deemed too much of a financial outlay by the Ministre de la Maison du Roi for a collection in which “very few objects would find their place in the royal museum, which is devoted to masterpieces rather than to curiosities of sculpture.”[92] (Indeed, the almost anachronistic use of the word “curiosity” here, recalling eighteenth-century cabinets of the same name, further speaks to the heterogeneity and aesthetic indeterminacy of this moment.) Yet, the Drovetti collection’s loss was almost universally lamented in the subsequent years, and was held up as a justification for the later purchase of Egyptian collections. Auguste Forbin (1777–1841), general director of museums from 1816, articulated this sentiment in 1824 when arguing for the acquisition of the Durand collection, and Champollion did the same when writing in favor of attaining the Salt collection in 1825.[93]

The Louvre collected widely during the Restoration, beyond the narrow purview of Egyptian antiquities. One such example was the Durand collection, which entered the Louvre in 1824 and contained an important group of French medieval and Renaissance works of fine and decorative art in addition to its Egyptian component. Other like collections followed, notably that of the painter Pierre-Henri Révoil (1776–1842) in 1828, whose “gothic” objects were eventually displayed in galleries located alongside the Egyptian rooms of the Musée Charles X.[94] A Musée de la Marine exhibiting model ships and naval accessories on the first floor of the Cour Carrée’s north wing was established in the same royal decree as was the Musée Charles X, which also recommended including “all Oriental, Phoenician, Persian, and Hindu monuments that exist in the museum or that will be added to it” in Champollion’s half of the museum, though no evidence suggests that this was ever done.[95] Moreover, the author of a letter proposing the founding of a museum of Egyptian antiquities advocated for establishing a special museum for monuments of industry and the indigenous peoples of Oceania, demonstrating the breadth of interest in non-Western (and even contemporary) cultures as early as 1826.[96] In 1839, Edmé-François Jomard (1777–1862), a member of the Expedition of Egypt who had long hoped to be named curator of Egyptian art instead of Champollion, was finally appointed head of an ethnographic museum housed in the royal library.[97]

What is significant in all this is not only the radically expanded scope of the Louvre’s willingness to collect on a large scale the art of new geographies and time periods, but that the rapid rate of acquisitions during this period exceeded the Louvre administration’s ability to develop a language to speak about it, testimony to the urgency with which it was felt that history needed to be rehabilitated or even “filled in.” The contemporaneous press was consistent in its use of the term “history” when writing about the Musée Charles X, but what was less clear was how artifacts of history and fine art, here conceived of as sculpture, could be reconciled. In other words, what was it that the Musée Charles X purported to enable scholars and the public to study? If it was history, was it the history of objects, the history of civilizations, or of people themselves? By the 1870s, Adrien de Longpérier (1816–1882), curator of sculpture (including Egyptian and later Assyrian art) at the Louvre following the death of Clarac, would go so far as to claim that Champollion’s Egyptian display was, indeed, an early instantiation of ethnography.[98] For naturalist André Étienne d’Audebert, Baron de Férussac (1786–1836), in whose journal (Bulletin universel des sciences et de l’industrie [Bulletin Férussac]) Champollion often published, the Egyptian museum was a means for “understanding the history of people,” while for Jomard, the first ethnographic museum found its seeds in the Musée de la Marine.[99] Indeed, the difference between what was art and what was history stood at the center of these debates, whose outcome very tangibly affected the presentation of these new collections, and therefore of history, to the French public. While Champollion’s museum was one among many other contemporaneous government-funded museums in and around the Louvre in the 1820s, and may stand apart from them due to the thoughtful nature and the unique expertise with which he curated its collections, it is the most complete archival picture left to us and therefore offers unique insight into exhibition practices of that moment.

Further and more telling than the “messy” shift toward historicism evinced by the Louvre’s expanded collecting practices of the 1820s, though, was Forbin’s admission of a more deeply-rooted justification for acquiring the Durand works: “ever since the fate of war has come to strip the museum of the trophies it had accumulated, never has a more favorable opportunity presented itself to return this great establishment to all its splendor.”[100] The link was explicit: Egypt entered the vaunted galleries of the Louvre by way of a loss. Motivated by the lasting wound inflicted by the restitution of the Napoleonic spoils, Egypt became a consolation, if not necessarily a substitute, for the literal and metaphorical space vacated by the ideal of Greek sculpture. The rupture of historical certainty in the Restoration is distilled by an episode in the completion of the Musée Charles X’s decorative scheme. François-Edouard Picot (1786–1868), preparing to paint his plafond entitled Study Crowned with Laurels and the Genius of the Arts Unveiling Ancient Egypt to Greece (1827) in the Egyptian museum’s fourth gallery, initially conceived of unveiling Egypt not to Minerva, led by winged allegories of Genius and Study, but to the city of Paris itself, complete with an obelisk honoring King Charles X alongside the spires of Notre-Dame.[101] Picot’s substitution of ancient Greece for modern France expresses just how uncertain the role of Egypt was for the French conception of history (though its unveiling was no longer in question as it had been in Caylus’s frontispiece). Furthermore, it speaks to the scholarly advances, in particular Champollion’s own claims, about the direct impact of Egyptian art on Greek art. More broadly still, Picot’s late alteration emblematizes the tentativeness with which history was being constructed at this moment—a provisionality that Champollion himself had exploited and incorporated into the malleable structural apparatus that formed the base of his display. Given this fluidity of the conception of Egypt in the French consciousness, and moreover the volatility of the very notion of history, Champollion seized the opportunity to shape the public’s view of Egypt through his sophisticated curation of the Musée Charles X.