Philippe Bordes, review of L'Art singulier de Jean Huber, p. 608

The Rijksmuseum Bulletin, 2019

1997

Parergon, 2017

Treasury! Masterpieces from the Hermitage, 2019

On the occasion of the Anniversary exhibition 'Treasury!' I collected a few thoughts about art history in connection with my work of 18 years collaborating with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Working with its collections and its curators have broadened my view on the history of art. The design of the catalogue was done by www.gebr.silvestri.nl.

French Studies

Me voilà en in-folio rongé des rats et des vers comme un Père de l'Église.-Voltaire 1 Constructing a monument In 1770 Voltaire's friends commissioned a statue in his honour, an unprecedented mark of recognition for a living writer. They could not have foreseen that the resulting work, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle's Voltaire nu (1776), now in the Louvre, would cause hilarity and embarrassment in equal measure: then, as now, monuments to great men could prove to be problematic. When D'Alembert had invited Frederick II to subscribe to the statue, the King of Prussia accepted, of course, replying magnificently that it was Voltaire's writings that were his greatest monument: 'Le plus beau monument de Voltaire est celui qu'il s'est érigé lui-même, ses ouvrages, qui subsisteront plus longtemps que la basilique de Saint-Pierre, que le Louvre et tous ces bâtiments que la vanité humaine consacre à l'éternité' (28 July 1770, D16552). The king's letter was read aloud at the Académie française, whose members asked for it to be preserved in their archives. Voltaire, ever alert to good publicity, went one step further by ensuring that Frederick's letter was included in an edition of his own works, 2 so becoming part of that very monument the king had celebrated. During Voltaire's lifetime, there appeared many collected editions of his works, the most prestigious of these published by the Cramers in Geneva from 1756, though other editions appeared, often without the author's active participation or with only his tacit approval. But none of these editions resembled the 'complete editions' as we know them today. 3 Voltaire's primary concern was to multiply the number of editions in circulation, not in order to make money but to flood the