Feature: Dominique Vivant-Denon

Dominique-Vivant Denon, the subject of my piece in the November 19, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books, is known above all as the first Director of the Louvre—which, under his guidance, became the first encyclopedic public museum. But he was also an artist prized for his travel sketches and engravings. Since I could only touch on this aspect of his career briefly in my piece, I offer here some further notes and selections from his work.

Denon settled in Venice on the eve of the French Revolution, with the intention of creating his own engraving studio, and marrying his adored mistress, Isabella Teotochi. The Revolution changed all that. He had to return to France, during the Reign of Terror (under the protection of the painter Jacques-Louis David, associate of the Jacobins), to prevent the expropriation of his property. Then he was enrolled in General Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign in 1798, as one of its “savants.”

The Egyptian expedition offered an opportunity to feed the cultivated public’s insatiable curiosity for visual travelogue (photography was still some thirty years in the future). Denon became a first-rate sketcher of Egyptian ruins (his work recalls Piranesi’s views of Roman ruins, from a few decades earlier) and antiquities. The sketches were done on the spot, in haste, by the artist as he arrived on horseback with the army—the contemporary equivalent of the hand-held camera, if you will.