Taws, R

English

UCL Discovery

Vol. 43 No. 6 · 18 March 2021AT  T H E  M U S É E  D E S  A R T S  E T  M É T I E R SMadame de Genlis’s ModelsRichard TawsT    M                          in Paris is the best place I know to see a full-size lionrendered in spun glass  bre or an aeroplane in the form of a bat, to watch an automatonshow or to consider the uses, and potential drawbacks, of a bowler hat  tted with a spycamera. Founded during the French Revolution as an o shoot of the Conservatoire des arts etmétiers, which had been set up in 1794 to train future generations of artisans, mechanics andinventors, the museum opened its doors in 1802. Since then, the material evidence of scienti cand technical achievement has settled into comfortable retirement here, alongside delicious one-o s, bespoke gadgets and eccentric contraptions that didn’t quite hit the mark. Unusually for amuseum of technology, there’s a sense that not much has changed since the early days. Thecollection bends more recent additions to its logic. Mobile phones, computers, Minitel terminals,and even the ubiquitous digital information screens dotted around the museum, seem just asarchaic as their mechanical forebears, whose very strangeness can make them appear strikinglycontemporary.Unlike other Parisian institutions from the revolutionary era that self-consciously appropriatedroyal or religious buildings – the Louvre or the Panthéon, for example – the museum’s contentsare in clear conversation with the space they occupy, the former monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. In this temple of technology, founded by the polymathic Abbé Grégoire, spectacularmachines are displayed as Enlightened replacements for religious mysteries. But the old magicpersists, emanating now from secular marvels. Foucault’s pendulum dangles from the chapelceiling – the museum features in Umberto Eco’s novel – watched over by one of several models ofBartholdi’s Statue of Liberty. The enchantment begins before one even reaches the museum: theplatforms at Arts et Métiers métro station are a steampunk delight. Clad in copper sheetingpocked with portholes, they place the visitor directly inside Verne’s Nautilus or the interior of someantiquated scienti c device.The museum’s permanent displays contain many original scienti c artefacts (Vaucanson’s loom,Volta’s battery, Lavoisier’s laboratory), relics whose purpose was to inspire emulation. It alsohouses many models, which were better suited to teaching. Some of these are relatively routinereduced-scale machines, technical devices or architectural fragments, while others are remarkabledistillations of manufacturing or engineering processes. Recently on show in the exhibition TopModèles: une leçon princière au XVIIIe siècle were ten such models from 1782 that represent the interiorsof artisanal workshops. These were among the  rst objects to enter the museum: seventeen joinedthe collection in 1802, although it’s not known how many were made in total. Thirteen of themsurvive today. They were ordered from the engineer brothers Jacques-Constantin and Auguste-Charles Périer, and constructed by François-Étienne Calla, a former technician for Vaucanson. Inhis Tableau de Paris (1781-88), Louis-Sébastien Mercier described with enthusiasm the ‘curious anduseful’ nature of this project, which was still then in progress. In the last years of the AncienRégime the models were used by Caroline-Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, betterknown as Madame de Genlis, to educate the children of the duc de Chartres, soon to become theduc d’Orléans, placing him next in line to the throne a er the king’s immediate family. Cosplayingas a man of the people following the outbreak of revolution, he changed his name to PhilippeÉgalité and in 1793 voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI (he too would die at the guillotinelater that year). In 1830, Philippe Égalité’s oldest son was put on the throne as King Louis-Philippe.Model of a porcelain manufactury created for Madame de Genlis byFrançois-Étienne Calla (1782)Model of a bullet foundry (1782)Model of a carpenter’s workshop (1782)Portrait of Madame de Genlis by Louis Edouard Riot (1839)A plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-72) depictingtools from a leather guildA plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-72) depictingtools from a metalworksDomestic interiors reduced to a small scale are familiar. It is less o en that we see a workplacesubmitted to the same kind of miniaturisation and scrutiny. Here, unobstructed by roofs or walls,A plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-72) depicting acheesemaker’s toolsthe focus is as much on the tiny objects that populate the spaces as on the spaces themselves. Takethe model representing a chemist’s laboratory, in which crucibles, stills, long-necked  asks andother receptacles in copper, glass, stoneware and wicker, each rendered with mind-bogglingdetail,  ll shelves and cover workbenches. Or the model of a porcelain manufactory, one of threedemonstrating the process of ceramic production, which displays moulds and wheels. Tiny piecesof unglazed porcelain line the racks behind. Each one of the model workshops – whether itrepresents a locksmith’s or a nail manufactory, a bullet foundry or the production of nitric acid – ismade to the same 1/8 scale. Each one is meticulously constructed, reassuringly expensive andspotless. In none of them can any people be seen.Madame de Genlis was made responsible for the education of the duke’s daughters in 1777,following a glittering rise through elite society and early acclaim for her virtuosic harp playing (theintricacy and precision of which seems consonant with the world of the models). In becomingtutor to the duke’s male heirs in 1782, she advanced into a di erent social and intellectual orbit.She established a reputation as an educational innovator, publishing Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres surl’éducation – a long epistolary novel that outlined many of her pedagogical principles and which waswidely translated – later that year. Adèle et Théodore was in uenced by Rousseau, whose Émile wasstill the pre-eminent treatise on education twenty years a er its publication, but Genlis departedfrom him in several ways, most notably in advocating the education of girls. Her intensive andvaried teaching methods were o en visual in character. She took the young princes Louis-Philippe, Antoine and Louis-Charles, and their sister Adélaïde, plus several other children,including her own, to visit workshops and artists’ studios; paintings provided instruction inmythology, while magic lantern projections taught history and geography. This is the schoolroomfor which the models were made, pioneering what schools and museums now call ‘object-basedlearning’.The miniature manufactories that Calla created are modelled directly on the engraved plates forDiderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. As with those images, the conceit that the models mightalso serve trade specialists was disingenuous – they were meant for curious outsiders, rather thanworkers who already knew how to make an enamel or construct a cabinet, and there was noquestion of viewers getting their hands dirty. The dominant visual strategy in the Encyclopédieinvolves each vertical plate being split along a horizontal axis. The lower section shows thecomponent objects (the locks, the nails, the bullets) laid out in shadowless white space, brokendown to their essential elements and itemised with forensic speci city. The upper section of eachplate comprises a vignette depicting the workshop in action. This ‘epic of substance’, Bartheswrites in his essay on the plates, o ers us for the  rst time an ‘autonomous iconography of theobject’, the transition from raw materials to  nished commodity accomplished with no greaterforce than turning the page. For Barthes, the Encyclopédie’s peaceful scenes and orderedarrangements of objects, materials and tools conceal a violence, a ‘wild surrealism’ that, whetherwe want it to or not, shows us the ‘wrong side of things’.In Genlis’s models (and they are hers in spirit and practice), the workshop space and inventory oftools and objects – separated in the Encyclopédie – cohere into one scene. The models repair afractured world of things, making it whole and intact. Yet there is no one there to disturb thecalm. The happy artisans of the Encyclopédie in their tidy, evenly lit studios betray no hint of theirlabour. The stink of the tannery, the heat of the furnace, the grubby printer’s devils, are allexpunged. But the models go a stage further, stripping these scenes of the last vestiges of humanpresence. They appear almost haunted, still lifes whose protagonists have just departed.Whenever I think of the Musée des arts et métiers, my abiding memory is the sound of my ownfootsteps. The surprisingly loud creak of the varnished  oors, many of them latticed with metaltracks for moving heavy machinery, accompanies visitors throughout the main galleries. Thesmaller squeaks are a constant reminder that we are in the company of objects that formerlysighed, hummed, clanged and buzzed (and also, perhaps, that the museum deserves morevisitors). Of all materials, it is wood that dominates Genlis’s models. This is most obvious in thecarpenter’s workshop, a mise-en-abyme of highly skilled precision woodwork. No ordinarycarpenter worked here, but an ébéniste, someone adept in veneers or marquetry – the tools on thewall are those of a specialist. Barthes was quick to notice that the preponderance of wood in themachines of the Encylopédie had a humanising e ect, making them seem like a series of ‘big toys’.But what happens when there’s no one there to play with them? For those of us con ned to ourhomes all year, this is a particularly eerie thought. By the time we get back to our long-abandonedworkplaces, they will probably seem as alien as these deserted stage sets, frozen in time andscrubbed clean by invisible hands.

At the Musée des arts et métiers: Madame de Genlis’s Models

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10127391/1/Richard%20Taws%20%C2%B7%20At%20the%20Muse%CC%81e%20des%20arts%20et%20me%CC%81tiers_%20Madame%20de%20Genlis%E2%80%99s%20Models%20%C2%B7%20LRB%2018%20March%202021.pdf

At the Musée des arts et métiers: Madame de Genlis’s Models

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

UCL Discovery