Conti collection
The Conti collection was brought together in the second half of the 18th century by Louis-François de Bourbon, prince de Conti in the Palais du Temple in Paris and was characterized by a variety of techniques, schools and subjects that were not often found in Paris . In combination with objects from natural history, the collection opened up the whole world of the natural and the artistic; human work in all its shades, from sensual pleasure to intellectual analysis, found its place in the Palais du Temple alongside the richness of the flora and fauna. The interests of the prince, who saw himself as prince éclairé , as an enlightened prince, ranged from antiquity to his time, from Europe to Asia .
On the one hand, the painting collection reflected the taste ideas of the time, it corresponds to a communauté de goût . However, Conti avoided the often lamented one-sidedness for a particular school. His collection of Italian art in particular was exceptional; it placed the collector on the same level as his cousins Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duke of Orléans in the Palais Royal .
The artists listed by Pierre Remy in the catalog read like a 'Who's Who' of art history from the 16th to the 18th centuries: Titian , Tintoretto , Correggio , Veronese , Leonardo , Raffael , Guido Reni , Caravaggio , the Carracci , Pietro da Cortona , Guercino , Velazquez , Murillo , Boucher , Bourdon , Chardin , Coypel , Fragonard , Greuze , Jouvenet , Lebrun , Le Lorrain , the Le Nain brothers , Le Sueur , the van Loo family , Natoire , Nattier , Poussin , Vernet , Vouet , Watteau , Pieter Bruegel the Elder J. , Gerard Dou , van Dyck , Jordaens , Metsu , Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade , Paulus Potter , Rembrandt , Rubens , Ruisdael , David Teniers the Elder. J. , Albrecht Dürer .
According to the sales catalog from 1777, the painting collection comprised 262 (24%) works by artists from Italian schools (including Spanish artists), 469 (43%) from Nordic schools (Flemish, Dutch and German) and over 325 (30%) works of the French school, together with the 28 (3%) unspecified paintings, this results in a total of 1084 works that Conti bought from the most important collections of his time in about fifteen years. The 319 drawings (I: 126, N: 118, F: 72, NN: 3) in his collection come to a large extent from the sales of Lempereur (1773) and Mariette (1775). The collection was supplemented by 143 (I: 8, N: 30, F: 77, NN: 28) gouaches and miniatures.
Today the paintings are scattered all over the world: from the Louvre in Paris, from various museums in Versailles, Tours, Angers, Caen and Bordeaux to the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg The list of current collections that have pictures from the provenance of Conti extends to museums in Boston, Los Angeles and Washington.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Catalog d'une riche Collection de Tableaux Des Maîtres les plus célebres des trois Ecoles; Dessins Aussi des plus grands Maîtres, sous verre & en feuilles, Bronzes, Marbres, Terre Cuite du Quesnoi, de Bouchardon, & c. Pierres gravées antiques, Pendules, Montres & Bijoux, & autres objets curieux, Qui composent le cabinet de feu Son Altesse Sérénissime le Prince de Conti, Prince du Sang, & Grand Pieure de France. Cette vente se fera le Mardi, 8 April 1777, trois heures & demie précise de relevée, jours suivants, au Palais du Temple . Pierre Remy, Paris 1777, digitized .
Web links
literature
Frédéric Bußmann , collecting as a strategy. The collections of the Prince de Conti in the Paris of the outgoing Ancien Régime , Berlin, Gebr. Mann 2010 ( ISBN 978-3-7861-2604-1 ), in French. prince collectionneur: Louis-François de Bourbon Conti et ses collections au palais du Temple à Paris , Paris, Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme 2012 (= Passages / Passagen, vol. 38), ISBN 978-2-7351- 1438-2 .