Pedagogical innovation and reform at the Academie de France a Rome during the directorate of Charles-Joseph Natoire (1752--1775)

This dissertation examines the pedagogical innovations and reforms instituted at the Academie de France a Rome during the directorate of the painter Charles-Joseph Natoire, which lasted from 1752 until 1775. Natoire's directorate coincided with the appointment in 1751 of Abel-Francois Poisson de Vandieres, later the marquis de Marigny, to the position of Directeur General des Batiments du Roi, which oversaw the Academie in Rome and which Marigny held until 1773. Both men were unusually well-qualified for the roles they were to perform: Natoire had himself studied at the Academie in Rome as a pensionnaire in the 1720s, while Marigny traveled throughout Italy from 1748 until 1751 in a tour intended to educate him for the post he was to fill. In response to growing public criticism and concern in the 1740s regarding the perceived decline of French art, these two talented and educated administrators worked to strengthen the program at the Academie de France a Rome, which was seen as a key element in the reformation of French art. Together, they ushered in a golden age of attention and organization for an institution that had been sadly neglected for the first half of the eighteenth century.; Using the correspondence between these two administrators, as well as artists' letters, travel diaries, extant drawings and sculptures, and the unpublished quarterly accounts for the Academie de France a Rome at the Archives Nationales in Paris, the dissertation attempts to reconstruct the elements of instruction offered at the Academie de France a Rome during Natoire's directorate. These included the reinvigoration of the pensionnaires' studies after the model, a new emphasis on making copies after the antique and Old Masters for purely pedagogical purposes, the use of extant artists' drawings as teaching aids, and the encouragement of landscape painting as an alternate genre to history painting. The dissertation also examines the administrative changes that strengthened the Academie de France a Rome at this time, specifically the establishment of the Ecole des Eleves Proteges in Paris, the regularization of the prix de Rome contests and the enforcement of pension term limits.