Pierre-Victorien Lottin

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Lottin de Laval , painting by Thomas Couture (1815–1879)

Pierre-Victorien Lottin (pseudonym: Lottin de Laval ; born September 19, 1810 in Orbec , † February 23, 1903 in Menneval , Département Eure ) was a French archaeologist , writer and painter . From 1839 to 1851 he made three archaeological trips on the official behalf of the French government. From these trips he brought back numerous notes, drawings, paintings and reports, which are now in the archives of the Eure department, in the museums of Bernay and Orbec, the city library of Rouen and in the Oriental Antiquities Department of the Louvre . He developed the so-called lottinoplasty , which made it possible to make casts of antiquities without damaging the originals.

Life

origin

When Pierre-Victorien Lottin was born in Orbec in 1810, the city had not yet fully recovered from the turmoil of the revolutionary era. From the Middle Ages to the French Revolution (1789–1799) Orbec was an influential city, the seat of a Vicomté and a Bailliage , whose jurisdiction was the larger cities of Lisieux and Bernay . In 1790 the administration of the region was transferred to Lisieux. Tranquille Lottin, Pierre-Victorien Lottin's father, was one of the most staunch Republicans; he was born in Saint-Germain d'Aunay ( Orne department ). He joined the army when he was 21 and stayed there for over ten years. After the Peace of Amiens in 1802, Tranquille Lottin left the army and became a hatter in Orbec. In 1809, at the age of 39, he married sixteen-year-old Marie Victoire Delaval. Victorien Pierre was born a year later. He was eight years old when his mother passed away. Pierre-Victorien Lottin's little sister grew up with an uncle, he himself stayed with his father and attended a Latin school. According to his own statements, he left Orbec when he was fourteen years old and sought his fortune in Paris, where he lived with an uncle. He taught himself using works from public reading rooms, the so-called cabinets de lecture . François Guizot (1787–1874) got him a job as a secretary to the Egyptologist Achille Émille Prisse (1807–1879), known as Prisse d'Avennes . Lottin made the acquaintance of Jules Janin (1804–1874), who wrote benevolently about him. At the age of 20, Lottin moved in the circles of writers and artists.

Lottin de Laval

Inscription on the grave of Pierre-Victorien Lottin in Menneval

From 1833 Lottin began to call himself Lottin de Laval , using the real name of his mother, Delaval , but spelling it like the name of a noble family . In 1839 he acquired the Trois Vals house in Menneval near Bernay. When his father Tranquille died on February 14, 1852, Pierre-Victorien Lottin was mayor of Menneval and gave his father's name as Tranquille Victorien Constant Lottin de Charny . He himself signed the civil status book with Victorien Lottin de Laval . Lottin knew from his local historical studies that the noble de Charny branch of the Lottin family had already died out at that time. Lottin's wife Marguerite (1922–1901) and Lottin himself were later also buried in the father's grave in the Menneval cemetery. After 1880 Lottin was particularly interested in oriental painting . Lottin died as a result of a fall. He climbed onto a chair to take a picture from the wall, fell and broke his thigh.

to travel

When Lottin wrote about Enguerrand de Marigny (1260-1315) and Tankred von Lecce (1138-1194), he got tired of sitting in dusty archives, he wanted to study the history in their locations and therefore set out in the footsteps of Drogo von Hauteville († 1051) from 1834 to 1836 a trip to Italy , Sicily , Dalmatia and Illyria . His book Un an sur les chemins reports on this trip. In 1842 Lottin traveled to Alsace and Belgium . In 1843 he was officially commissioned by the French government to undertake a research trip to the Orient. The journey lasted four years. He followed the “Route of the Crusades of the 12th Century” on the first trip (1843–1844) . He sent notes and drawings from Erzurum , Kars and Ani and other places to Paris. The second stage takes him to Babylonia . In Mosul he met Paul-Émile Botta (1802-1870) and witnessed the rediscovery of Nineveh . Lottin's traveling companion Charles de Gatines published a report on this stage in 1862 in the Revue de l'Orient .

Lottinoplasty of a relief from a Sahure expedition in Wadi Maghara

The third official mission took Lottin from 1850 to 1851 to the Arabian Peninsula , the Sinai Peninsula and Middle Egypt . The curator Félicien de Saulcy (1807–1880) had commissioned him to reconstruct the path that the Israelites had taken when they left Egypt . He described this journey in the book Voyage Dans La Peninsule Arabique Du Sinai Et L'Egypte Moyenne , which appeared in three volumes from 1855 to 1859. Many of the lottinoplasties that Lottin made on this trip were exhibited in the Louvre. In Cairo he put together an expedition team. The journey led from Suez along the coast of the Gulf of Suez to Uyun Musa, the "source of Moses ", which was believed to be the place of Mara in the Bible . Then to Gharandal, which was thought to be the Elim oasis , to Abu Zenima and finally to Wadi Maghara . Lottin made, among other things, two lottinoplasties of reliefs that Sahure (reign 2490 to 2475 BC) had left behind during expeditions to the turquoise mines there. Then Lottin moved northeast to the Valley of the Inscriptions, Mokatteb , on the Jebel Serbal. There Lottin documented inscriptions by the Nabataeans . Some inscriptions date from the 15th BC. And it is the representation of Egyptian sounds with the alphabet of the local population. The journey then led past the Feiran oasis, to the St. Catherine's Monastery and Mount Sinai . He then traveled on to the Gulf of Aqaba and back to Suez. On the Sinai Peninsula, Lottin made around 700 lottinoplasties and drawings of inscriptions, steles and reliefs. From Suez he traveled to the quarries of Tura and to Memphis , Saqqara and finally to Cairo. The quarries in Tura can no longer be visited today. Some of the steles and reliefs that Lottin made molds of were later destroyed or stolen. When he embarked in Alexandria for the return journey to France, he had 200 kilograms of lottinoplasties in his luggage.

medal

Portrait of Lottin (1840) by Auguste Charpentier , here Lottin is wearing the July cross

In July 1831 Lottin was awarded the July Cross for preventing a section of the Louvre from being looted in 1830. In July 1845 Lottin received the Order of the Sun and Lion with the rank of commander in Tehran . On March 24, 1847, Lottin received the Order of Merit of the Legion of Honor as Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur for the "scientific missions" he had carried out on behalf of the government in Persia , the Arab countries and Egypt .

Lottinoplasty

As Lottin in winter 1843, the cuneiform to the castle of Van saw, he tried by the cuneiform imitation copy but had to retire because of persistent bad weather. Then he remembered experiments that he had made ten years earlier in Italy with casting techniques and obtained the necessary ingredients in Baghdad . Then he developed the lottinoplasty .

Works

literature

  • Nicole Zapata-Aubé: Lottin de Laval . Archéologiste et Peintre Orientaliste. Association pour la Promotion de la Culture, Bernay 1997. (French)
  • Charles de Gatines: Journal d'un Voyage en Orient . In: Société orientale de France (ed.): Revue de l'Orient . tape 14 . Delavigne, Paris 1862, p. 43-51 (French, online ).

Web links

Commons : Pierre-Victorien Lottin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 15
  2. ↑ a b Zapata-Aubé p. 16
  3. ^ A b Victor Le Fort: Lottin de Laval, le père du flan . In: La Revue illustrée du Calvados . Imprimerie Morière, Lisieux April 1914 ( online [accessed 11 August 2011]).
  4. ↑ État Civile 1813-1852. Mairie de Menneval, pp. 620 + 639f , accessed on August 11, 2011 (French).
  5. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 25
  6. ↑ Un an sur les chemins , page 3f
  7. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 29
  8. ↑ Zapata-Aubé pp. 63-66
  9. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 70
  10. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 79
  11. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 84
  12. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 86
  13. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 108
  14. ↑ Ministère de la Culture Archives Nationales N ° L1662030 (French)
  15. ↑ Gustave Vapereau (1819–1906): Dictionnaire universel des contemporains . contenant toutes les personnes notables de la France et des pays étrangers. 6th edition. L. Hachette, Paris 1893, p. 1018 (French, online on Gallica [accessed August 8, 2011]). (French)
  16. ↑ Zapata-Aubé p. 32
personal data
SURNAME Lottin, Pierre-Victorien
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Laval, Lottin de (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 19, 1810
PLACE OF BIRTH Orbec
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1903
Place of death Menneval