Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2024
Publication Title
Gesta
Abstract
In September 1794, the French army, after conquering much of Belgium and the Netherlands, marched into Aachen. This early campaign of military conquest turned into the first laboratory for the systematic plunder of cultural assets enacted by various post-revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes from 1794 to 1815. Works of art “liberated” from the tyranny of aristocratic and religious ownership were earmarked for the newly opened Musée Central des Arts (now the Louvre) to showcase the enlightened cultural supremacy of Paris. From Aachen, the conquerors took more than the usual loot of movable assets: they “extracted” some forty columns from Charlemagne’s famed palatine chapel. Thirty-two of these monoliths, set in the eight gallery-level arches, were already Carolingian-era spolia, having been removed from Rome and Ravenna with as much effort and cost as would be the case a thousand years later. Of particular interest to medievalists is the fact that ten of the Aachen columns were integrated into the architectural fabric of the Galerie des Antiques, the Musée Central des Arts’ spectacular collection of Greco-Roman statuary that opened to the public in November 1800. Contemporary documents do not associate these columns with a medieval building, but they consistently underscore their provenance from “the tomb of Charlemagne.” After reviewing the resonance that association held for Napoleon, the protracted restitution process that followed his downfall is examined against the emergence of a national patrimonial rhetoric, in part galvanized by the failed return of the ten Aachen columns, which remain in the Louvre to this day. As a study of the contested afterlife of seemingly mute and immovable architectural elements, this article also attends to the way these columns legitimized the modern museum as a radically new type of institution.
—Carol Heitz in memoriam
Volume
63
Issue
2
First Page
169
Last Page
203
DOI
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731247
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Rights
© 2024 International Center of Medieval Art
Recommended Citation
Buettner, Brigitte, "The Columns from “the Tomb of Charlemagne” between Aachen and the Louvre: A Modern Spoliation Saga" (2024). Art: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/art_facpubs/32
Comments
Archived as published.