ABSTRACT
Europe is being carried towards a culture of the arts by a single movement, an impetus which is a direct result of the central power emanating from Italy and Rome. Rome, whose works of art the French Revolution intended to liberate, was already an actual historical continuation, i.e. of the Papal cultural policy which consisted of the continuous reproduction of Antiquity, Pope Nicholas V having had the idea of ‘re-establishing the architecture of ancient Rome’. Rome was in fact the archetypal Museum. Factually speaking, just as Rome was the prototype, so the pagan religion provided the aesthetic principle of the Museum. Antoine Quatremere saw the Louvre as contributing to the destruction of an enlightened Europe centred around Rome: a Rome which was at once the great monad, the ultimate collection, the hotbed of knowledge and the heart of an international society whose links were forged by cultural exchanges.
