| Memory
and Modernity focuses on the first project of the reknowned nineteenth-century
French architect and theorist Eugéne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc,
the restoration of the Romanesque church of the Madeleine at Vézelay
in Burgundy. This is the first book-length study to approach the work
of Viollet-le-Duc from the perspective of institutional and social
history.
Kevin D. Murphy situates the Vézelay restoration project
within the government architectural bureacracy that emerged in the
July Monarchy. Drawing on extensive archival records, he describes
the controversy that arose from the restoration process, as changes
in the physical form of the church, its permitted uses, and its
place in history provoked heated exchanges among the Burgundy region
and Paris, the Catholic clergy and government officials.
Examining in detail the architect's transformation of the church
of the Madeleine, the book also draws out the implications of the
project for understanding Viollet-le-Duc's theoretical development.
Murphy shows how Viollet-le-Duc's rationalist interpretation of
medieval architecture informed the decisions that were made about
the restoration, but also how that way of thinking was influenced
by the architect's experience at Vézelay. |
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| Kevin
D. Murphy is Associate Professor of Art History at the City
University of New York Graduate Center and Brooklyn College. He is
the co-editor, with Sarah L. Giffen, of A Noble and Dignified Stream:
The Piscataqua Region in the Colonial Revival, 1860-1930 (Old
York Historical Society, 1992), which won the Ruth Emery Award for
Nineteenth-Century Studies. |
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