Sculpture is no longer quite the poor relation in eighteenth-century French art studies which it once was. Although the academic curriculum still requires a considerable knowledge of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jacques-Louis David but only, at best, a passing familiarity with Antoine Coysevox or Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, the literature on French sculpture available to those teaching courses on French art is far more substantial than it was twenty years ago. Building on the foundations laid by François Souchal, a series of impressive exhibitions curated by both French and American scholars—notably Guilhem Scherf, James Draper, and Anne Poulet—have given a new prominence to sculptors such as Augustin Pajou, Clodion, and Jean-Antoine Houdon. Necessarily, however, these were monographic projects, although the imaginative Houdon exhibition (Jean-Antoine Houdon: Die sinnliche Skulptur), recently shown in Frankfurt and Montpellier, went beyond the conventional format by setting works by Houdon alongside those of contemporary sculptors. The three volumes reviewed here complement the exhibitions of the past decade by offering three alternative approaches, all of them thematic rather than monographic.

One very active area of research in French sculpture studies has been sculpture in bronze. Cast in Bronze—the catalogue of an exhibition first shown at the Louvre and later at the Metropolitan Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum—reflects the results of a relatively new interest in works that have been neglected in favor of Italian and even German bronzes. As Geneviève Bresc outlines cogently in her introduction, the loss of most monumental and religious works during the French Revolution means that we have only a very partial view, but it is nonetheless clear that sculpture in this medium played an increasingly prominent and important role in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. For the first time the significance of French bronzes can now be brought into proper focus. Apart from assembling an impressive range of surviving works, drawn primarily from the Louvre, the Royal Collection in the United Kingdom, and Dresden, this exhibition and its catalogue offer by far the fullest available overview of this distinctive category of sculpture.

Following a section devoted to the royal patronage of sculptors in bronze during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Barthélemy Prieur and Michel Anguier are key figures here—the focus shifts to the phenomenal production of sculpture in bronze under Louis XIV and the resonance of the material as a medium for public sculpture. The extent of this is mapped out clearly by Françoise de la Moureyre, while Odile Fouchy-Le Bras explores the complexities of the all-important relationship between sculptors and founders. One especially notable inclusion was the Parnasse François, the large bronze of Parnassus peopled with French writers and artists, commissioned by Titon de Tilly to celebrate the great men of Louis XIV’s reign. The place of this work in the development of a pantheon of “worthies,” culminating in the late eighteenth-century Grands Hommes series, had earlier been well researched by Judith Colton in her The Parnasse François (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Set in the context of this exhibition, however, both the originality of this bizarre invention became newly apparent. The work could be seen as an example of virtuoso casting as well as a composition in which the royal associations of the material itself were being brought into play. As elsewhere in exhibition and catalogue alike, the particular attention paid here to the material—something characteristic of recent turns in cultural as well as art history—reveals new meaning.

In the third section, which deals with bronzes in the eighteenth century, the narrative related here takes a decisive twist. While bronze continued to be used for royal statues such as Edmé Bouchardon’s Louis XV (designed 1748, erected 1763), it was also increasingly employed for an emergent genre of smaller-scale figure groups. A public medium was becoming domesticated and commodified. As Robert Wenley shows in his essay, these French examples may now be recognized as distinct from Florentine late Baroque bronzes of similar subjects. The use of bronze shifts again, as Guilhem Scherf shows, when it is adopted by Houdon who established his own foundry, thereby maintaining a control that the sculptor had often lacked. Throughout the text there are new insights into the technical procedures and material qualities of these sculptures. This concern with issues of production is complemented, albeit less overtly, by an awareness of how these bronzes were received and viewed, not only at their moment of origin but also, as Jonathan Marsden demonstrates in his essay about the international taste for French bronzes, at later periods in their collecting history.

If Cast in Bronze considers one category of sculpture through its material, Anne Betty Weinshenker’s A God or a Bench considers the practices of sculptors more generally within an institutional and social context and engages head-on with the supposedly problematic status of sculpture. Although this is an issue to which historians of sculpture constantly (and indeed almost obsessively) return, Weinshenker’s study forwards the debate by being admirably detailed and sustained in the way it explores the specific conditions in which sculpture was produced and viewed in eighteenth-century France. Beginning with a discussion about the place and visibility of sculpture (ranging from royal monuments to garden figures), she goes on to address both the commemorative role of sculpture and the way in which the tricky relationship between sculpture and idolatry was dealt with in religious sculpture. The focus then shifts from the various categories of sculpture and their societal roles to discussions of the social status of sculptors and the way in which sculpture was represented in other media. Here, Weinshenker analyses with care and clarity the often marginal status accorded to sculptors—something she has explored in an earlier study of the dispute between Charles Le Brun, director of France’s Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and the ivory carver Pierre-Simon Jaillot (“Simon Jaillot Pamphleteer and Outcast” in Regina Hewit and Pat Rogers, eds., Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Society, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002, 154–175)—and uses both painted portraits of scuIptors and the imagery of allegories of sculpture as a register of contemporary attitudes to the art.

It is indeed an alertness to the relationship between different media that underpins what is perhaps the most original part of the book—the chapter examining the paragone in the eighteenth century. Although this subject has been much discussed for earlier periods, Weinshenker’s account is by far the most detailed consideration of its reworking in eighteenth-century France. The series of questions posed in these successive chapters gives the book a very different structure from surveys such as Michael Levey’s Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), with its emphasis on individual sculptors’ careers. The prominence given to contemporary sources, and the emphasis on texts rather than on individual works, mean that there are few detailed analyses of particular works that would challenge the assertions made by academicians hostile to sculpture as an art. But this is a welcome addition to the literature on eighteenth-century French sculpture and should be on the reading list for any course on French art of this period.

Although Weinshenker’s study deals with some late eighteenth-century examples, her text is concerned primarily with sculpture from the first half of the century. By contrast, Erika Naginski’s Sculpture and Enlightenment deals with the transformation of the monument—by which she means (despite her title) both sculpture and architecture—as the conventions of the ancien regime were being radically reworked around the time of the Revolution. Richly learned in its sources, impressively ambitious in its conceptual framework, and eloquently written, this is a remarkable text. The book is concerned with, as Naginski puts it, “how the French Enlightenment and its monuments worked over and against faith in church and crown to commemorate a civic and secular world-view” (1). The reworking of traditional conventions for commemoration also involved both creation of new types of monument as well as the destruction of inappropriate ones; and by considering works (both erected and destroyed) in the pre-Revolutionary period as well after the Revolution, Naginski offers a subtle reading of the complexities of the public role of both sculpture and architecture between 1750 and 1820.

Sculpture and Enlightenment is of course far from a simple narrative account. Indeed, while the opening chapter clearly frames large questions such as how public art intersected with pre-Revolutionary aesthetics and social philosophies and how a form of art straddling architecture and sculpture might be interpreted, the text is structured less as an evolving overarching argument than as a series of meticulously researched and densely documented case studies, interwoven with provocative and subtly nuanced interpretative comments about these broader issues. Beginning with a discussion of the Bourbon neglect of the monuments at St Denis—so revising a familiar narrative of Revolutionary iconoclasm—Naginski goes on to consider the ways in which the Mausoleum of the Dauphin and Dauphine erected in Sens cathedral (1776–77) exemplified Denis Diderot’s conception of conjugal love. Diderot himself played a key role in establishing the imagery of this, the only major funerary monument erected in the eighteenth century to a member of the French royal house, and the way in which traditional allegories were here nuanced is explored in an extended discussion of the “connection between metaphysical debates and sculptural practices” (96). This chapter alone constitutes a major addition to debates about eighteenth-century tomb sculpture.

The reconfiguration of the commemorative is pursued further in the next chapter through an interpretation of Pierre Julien’s figure of Nicolas Poussin (1804)—one of the comte d’Angiviller’s Grands Hommes commissions—in terms of “sculpture’s divorce from rhetoric in order to emphasize the semantic power of the visual” (164). Placing the autonomy of this figure within a heroic discourse shaped as much by the thinking of the philosophes as by royal patriotism, Naginski demonstrates how sculpture broke free of the rhetoric of the eulogy. Her chapter thus complements the recent studies edited by Thomas Gaehtgens and Gregor Wedekind (Le culte des grands homes 1750–1850; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2009) and June Hargrove’s earlier The Statues of Paris (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1989). It might be added that the trajectory followed here corresponds to a shift happening slightly earlier within British sculpture; though Naginski refers to monuments in Westminster Abbey as a model, perhaps Louis-François Roubiliac’s Newton (1755) and John Michael Rysbrack’s Locke (1755) might also have been brought in here.

The final example considered in this series of case studies is the Pantheon in which commemoration works through a combination of sculpture and architecture. Here the discussion of the designs for the pediment and the handling of relief underline the importance of this neglected sculptural genre within a newly configured public sphere. The close and intense focus on this series of particular works means that the general issues outlined at the start tend to be engaged with obliquely through perceptive asides; conversely, this approach ensures that reductive generalizations are resisted by acknowledging the complexity and ambiguity of these questions.

By treating architecture and sculpture together, the two constituting inextricably linked components of the commemorative and monumental, Naginski’ s richly layered text situates sculpture as a major bearer of meaning in a culture in which allegorical modes were being reworked for use for new publics. Sculpture is not seen here as separate but as central. In general this is a highly productive strategy, but sometimes the very density of the context Naginski constructs partially marginalizes the act of viewing a sculptural object. While she rightly interprets the freestanding format of the Dauphin’s monument at Sens in terms of the tradition of the ephemeral funeral catafalque, the work might also have been seen in relation to the emergence of the free-standing gallery sculptural group.

These three very different books offer distinct yet related approaches to the rich but still understudied field of sculptural production in the eighteenth century. Despite their very different modes of address, each text directs attention to the central role of sculpture within the culture and public life of eighteenth-century France. All three deserve a place on any syllabus dealing with French art of this period.