A Brill Calendar: February 11

Marriette and The Louvre

Few constituents of European culture were not influenced by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic sequel.

Museums are a fascinating embodiment of this truth.

When in 1793 the largest Royal Palace in Paris, the Louvre, changed its function - Marianne’s proud public treasury preserving works of art to grant commoners pleasures traditionally reserved for the privileged few - some necessary conditions were created for a new paradigm in collecting and preserving beautiful and precious curiosities.

National museums as we know them two centuries later were not born in one fell swoop, like Pallas out of the head of Zeus. For a decade the Louvre served to display the spoils of war amassed by Napoleon’s armies. Rapacity and modern museum-collections became mutual exclusives only after time.

It is seldom that the biography of just one museum-official reflects this change. Auguste-Ferdinand-Francois Mariette (Boulogne, France February 11 1821 – Cairo, Egypt January 19 1881) is this ‘rara avis’. He joined the Louvre’s Egyptian department in 1849 and visited this magical country for the first time soon thereafter, studying there for some four years; and acquiring a taste for excavation. Upon his return Mariette became Louvre Curator; for obvious reasons.

However, the Egyptian Government asked him a few years later to organize an ‘in situ’ conservation of antiquities. In 1858 Mariette said farewell to France the second time, never to return. Among his seminal archaeological exploits, the baring to rock level of the Great Sphinx, previously drowned in the desert, is a metaphor for a new awareness in conservation. When he died, unauthorized treasure-hunting by Europeans had by and large been expelled in Egypt and the foundations had been laid made for what is the world’s pre-eminent collection of Egyptian art in Bulaq, near Cairo.