Italian quattrocento sculpture: a controversial case in mid-nineteenth-century Paris

During the nineteenth century, Paris became the most important centre outside Italy for the Italian Renaissance sculpture market, as demonstrated by printed and manuscript sources. From the second decade of the century, works attributed to Donatello or Luca della Robbia began to circulate in some French private collections; the movement grew, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, in the 1840s. But French museums, first and foremost the Louvre, while acquiring some – admittedly minor – works by the della Robbia family early on, began only much later to build up a collection of Italian sculpture in a systematic manner. This article analyses the reasons for these different approaches to collecting. Among the causes, apart from the lack of adequate funding and the cultural choices of the curators, was the desire to promote the history of French sculpture, fuelled by a particular nationalist rhetoric. To understand the significant changes that occurred from the 1860s, international circumstances must be taken into account. Competition with the sculpture collection of the South Kensington Museum, built up by John Charles Robinson, and a desire to curb the dispersion of French private collections to foreign countries led to increasing criticism of the unwillingness to build a representative collection of early Italian Renaissance sculpture at the Louvre.