| In 1785, Quatremere de Quincy submitted an essay for the Prix Caylus sponsored by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres which he published 18 years later as De l'architecture egyptienne consideree dans son origine, ses principes et son gout, et comparee sous les memes rapports a l'architecture grecque. A comparison of these texts reveals that extensive alterations were made over the course of the French Revolution, most significantly the incorporation of language as a structural model for the analysis of architecture. The coincidence of verbal and visual forms of expression in the ruins of hieroglyphs-covered Egyptian buildings, had directed Quatremere towards more substantive similarities between language and architecture.;During the 18th century, Egyptology often served as a vehicle for speculations on the origins of civilization and as a tabula rasa on which a sacred or profane world view could be created. Engaged in this attempt to define the nature of primitive man, Quatremere identified parallel ways in which language and architecture had contributed to the establishment and progress of society. Using material and ideas explored in diverse fields of scholarship, Quatremere developed an epicentric theory of human origins and consequently of architecture. His radical multiplication of the primitive types of architecture led to a singular focus on the inventive capacity of man and in turn to a view of architecture and language as twin manifestations of social creation.;Quatremere perceived that language and architecture shared an artificial and conventional structure, a view that became the basis for a fundamental transformation of traditional theories of architectural imitation. Architecture was not often considered a fine art because it was functional rather than mimetic, yet Quatremere discovered in studies of language a principle of imitation that used cognition and intellection as its model. Able hence to celebrate the inherent abstraction particularly of classical architecture as the most progressive manifestation of mimesis, Quatremere now defined architecture's contribution to society not as its utility but as its capacity for articulate speech. By then using this newly identified form of communal expression as a text through which the social and political goals of the Revolution could be realized, Quatremere translated the classical tradition into a modern language of architecture. |
