ARCHITRAVE - Art and Architecture in German Travel Accounts to Paris and Versailles in the Baroque Era

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The project aims at scrutinizing the content of six substantial German travel accounts dating from 1685 to 1723, the only hitherto known from the baroque era in which profound and reasoned judgements and opinions on French art and architecture have been rendered. These manuscripts and printed documents from German public collections are partly unpublished and have never been investigated as a whole. The project will make them available in a richly commented and comfortably (re-)searchable digital portal, aiming at a multi-layered linkage of textual and iconographical ressources. The ambitions of the German-French research group are twofold: To merge the knowledge of French specialists on Paris and Versailles under Louis XIV with the acquaintance of their German colleagues with the chosen sources, and to demonstrate the capacities of a computer-based treatment of the texts to generate, for an academic as well as a non-academic public, innovative and reliable ways of questioning and exploring them. The core objective of the project is to contribute to a better understanding of the modes of appreciation of an alien culture in the baroque era. Even if drawn by an inquisitive admiration, German travellers have shown long before the height of the Enlightenment a critical distance towards French art and culture. It has not yet been investigated enough to what extent the contact with French culture contributed to the development of such a faculty of independent judgement, stabilizing inner German schemes of apprehension. The sceptical attitude commonly discernible in these documents compared here for the first time seems to have been a fertile soil for the development of a new aesthetic paradigm at the turn of the century: Around 1700, an appreciation of individual achievements and creative genius prevailed. The part German travellers to France played in this subversive and emancipatory process will have to be investigated.Also in regard to their literary qualities and linguistic specificities, the texts seem to belong to a transitory period. Even if in the late 17th century the traditional descriptive mode still prevailed, aiming at an allegedly objective and integral account of the art works seen, one already observes a growing ability of the travellers to focus on single aspects following their individual interests, and to express their emotions. The travel accounts constitute precious factual sources. They will help to understand the appearance of numerous buildings and their interior decorations modified or destroyed by time, as well as their contemporary uses and functions. In conjunction with the scientific investigation, an enriched and interactively searchable bilingual digital edition of the six sources will be produced via open access. The research portal will be accompanied by a web space for the wider public on the website of the Palace of Versailles.