ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the ways in which the new sense of what Stephen Bann has termed ‘historical mindedness’ – the rhetorical devices and discursive conventions used to create the past – shaped some of the real and imagined spaces in which French subjects lived. Questions instantly arose about where the essence of France and its people might be found, questions which were answered in part through the articulation of a new sense of space and time found in landscape painting. French artists might emulate the Ancients through the practice of the only genre capable of depicting the ideal human form in the modern world: history painting. A restored monarchy in septentrional France, albeit a far cry from the temperate zone of Athenian democracy, was, in turn, seen as the only institution capable of offering the arts informed and disinterested support. The principles of historical landscape painting were well known to the Parisian world of arts and letters.
