Classics at the dawn of the museum era

by Louis A. Ruprecht

"Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (1759-1849), arguably the foremost French classicist and art historian of the nineteenth century, is relatively little-known in English language scholarship. Three of his books were translated in the early nineteenth century, none in the twentieth century, and an important collection of two sets of open letters concerning museums, looting and repatriation was just published in 2012. Quatremère has been unfairly called 'the French Winckelmann,' a charge that sticks primarily because so little of his work has ever been translated. In fact, he shows...