Anne Claude de Caylus
Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox scientistAnne Claude de Tubières-Grimoard de Pestels de Lévis, comte de Caylus, marquis d'Esternay, baron de Bransac (Anne Claude Philippe; 31 October 1692Template:Snd5 September 1765),<ref>Template:BNF</ref> was a French antiquarian, proto-archaeologist and man of letters.
Born in Paris, he was the eldest son of Lieutenant-General Anne de Tubières, comte de Caylus.<ref name="EB1911">{{#if: |
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}}{{#ifeq: ||}}</ref> His mother, Marthe-Marguerite de Villette de Mursay, comtesse de Caylus (1673–1729), was the daughter of vice-admiral Philippe, Marquis de Villette-Mursay.
His younger brother was Charles de Tubières de Caylus, who became a naval officer and governor of Martinique.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>
He was a cousin of Mme de Maintenon, who brought Marthe-Marguerite up like her own daughter. Marthe-Marguerite wrote valuable Souvenirs of the court of Louis XIV; these were edited by Voltaire (1770), and by many later editors.<ref name="EB1911"/>
Career
While a young man, Caylus distinguished himself in the campaigns of the French army, from 1709 to 1714. After the peace of Rastatt (1714) he spent some time in travelling in Italy, Greece, the Levant, England and Germany, and devoted much attention to the study and collection of antiquities. He became an active member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and of the Académie des Inscriptions. Chief among his antiquarian works must be the profusely illustrated Recueil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises (6 vols., Paris, 1752–1755),<ref name="EB1911"/>Template:Efn which was mined by the designers of Neoclassical arts for the rest of the century.Template:Citation needed His Numismata Aurea Imperatorum Romanorum, treats only the gold coinage of the Roman emperors, those worthy of collection by a grand seigneur. His concentration on the object itself marked a step towards modern connoisseurship, and in his Mémoire (1755) on the method of encaustic painting, the ancient technique of painting with wax as a medium mentioned by Pliny the Elder, he claimed to have rediscovered the method. Denis Diderot, who was no friend to Caylus, maintained that the proper method had been found by J.-B. Bachelier.<ref name="EB1911"/>
Caylus was an admirable and prolific etcher. He worked chiefly from drawings by Italian and French masters, including examples from the collection of Pierre Crozat and the Cabinet du Roi (the collection of the King); he also made many etchings from drawings by his friend Antoine Watteau and the sculptor Edmé Bouchardon.<ref>Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et des Photographies, Inventaire du fonds français, graveurs du XVIIIe siècle, t. 4 (1940), pp. 53-155, lists 576 prints and suites of prints by Caylus.</ref> He caused engravings to be made, at his own expense, of Bartoli's copies from ancient pictures. His publications Nouveaux sujets de peinture et de sculpture (1755) and Tableaux tirés de l'Iliade, de l'Odyssée, et de l'Enéide (1757)<ref name="EB1911"/> consist of descriptions of subjects from classical literature for the inspiration of contemporary artists and their patrons.
His cultural interests were not confined to the arts of Classical Antiquity but extended to Gallic monuments, such as the megaliths of Aurille (Poitou), of which he commissioned drawings in 1762.Template:Citation needed
He encouraged artists whose reputations were still in the making, and befriended the connoisseur and collector of prints and drawings Pierre-Jean Mariette when Mariette was only twenty-two, but his patronage was somewhat capricious. Diderot expressed this fact in an epigram in his Salon of 1765: "Death has delivered us from the cruellest of connoisseurs."Template:Efn Caylus had quite another side to his character. He had a thorough acquaintance with the gayest and most disreputable sides of Parisian life, and left a number of more or less witty stories dealing with it. These were collected (Amsterdam, 1787) as his Œuvres badines complètes. The best of them is the Histoire de M. Guillaume, cocher (c. 1730).<ref name="EB1911"/> His Contes, hovering between French fairy tales and oriental fantasies, between conventional charm and moral satire, have been collected and were published in 2005;Template:Sfn they were originally published as les Féeries nouvelles (1741), les Contes orientaux (1743), Cinq contes de fées (1745), plus two posthumous stories published in 1775.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
The Template:Lang, published in 1805, is of very doubtful authenticity. See also E. and J. de Goncourt, Portraits intimes du XVIIIième siècle; Charles Nisard's edition of the Template:Lang (1877); and a notice by O. Uzanne prefixed to a volume of his Facties (1879).<ref name="EB1911"/> Template:Clear
Items of Caylus' collection
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Fairy tales
Folklorist Andrew Lang published some of Comte de Caylus's tales in his book The Green Fairy Book, as part of his collection of color fairy books. These are:
- Rosanella (Rosanie)<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 48–55.</ref>
- Heart of Ice (Le prince Courtebotte et la princesse Zibeline)<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 106–136.</ref>
- Sylvain and Jocosa (Tourlou et Rirette)<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 56–63.</ref>
- The Yellow Bird (L'Oiseau Jaune) – inserted in the narrative of Sylvain and Jocosa<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 59–63.</ref>
- Fairy Gifts (Les dons)<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 64–67.</ref>
The following tales were also published by Andrew Lang, but without the proper authorship:
- Prince Narcissus and the Princess Potentilla (La Princesse Pimprenella et Le Prince Romarin)<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 68–84.</ref>
- Prince Featherhead and the Princess Celandine (Le Prince Muguet et la Princesse Zaza)<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 85–99.</ref>
- Prince Vivien and the Princess Placida (Nonchalante et Papillon)<ref>Lang, Andrew. The Green Fairy Book. Longmans, Green. 1892. pp. 238–261.</ref>
British dramatist James Planché also translated the following of de Caylus's tales into English:
- Princess Minute and King Floridor (La princesse Minutie et le roi Floridor)<ref>Planché, J. R. (James Robinson), et al.. Four And Twenty Fairy Tales: Selected From Those of Perrault And Other Popular Writers. London: G. Routledge & Co., 1858. pp. 329–335. [1]</ref>
- The Impossible Enchantment (L'enchantement impossible)<ref>Planché, J. R. (James Robinson), et al.. Four And Twenty Fairy Tales: Selected From Those of Perrault And Other Popular Writers. London: G. Routledge & Co., 1858. pp. 336–357. [2]</ref>
- Bleuette and Coquelicot (Bleuette et Coquelicot)<ref>Planché, J. R. (James Robinson), et al.. Four And Twenty Fairy Tales: Selected From Those of Perrault And Other Popular Writers. London: G. Routledge & Co., 1858. pp. 358–374. [3]</ref>
The tale Mignonette was also translated into English as Prince Chaffinch.<ref>Montalba, Anthony Reubens. Fairy Tales From All Nations. New York: Harper, 1850. pp. 73–104. [4]</ref>
Works
- Template:Cite book
- Recueil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises : Tome cinquième (1762)
Notes
References
- Template:Cite book
- Three of his essays were anthologized in Charles Harrison, et al., 2001. Art In Theory 1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Blackwell): "On Drawings" (1732), "The Life of Antoine Watteau" (1748), and "On Composition" (1750).
External links
Sources
- Leonardo da Vinci: anatomical drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, exhibition catalog fully online as PDF from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on Caylus's da Vinci collection (see index)
- Contes orientaux / Oriental Tales at HathiTrust