Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet, one of Frances most influential historians and a founder of modern historical practice, was a passionate viewer and relentless interpreter of the visual arts. In this book, Michle Hannoosh examines the crucial role that art writing played in Michelets work and shows how it decisively influenced his theory of history and his view of the practice of the historian. The visual arts were at the very center of Michelets conception of historiography. He filled his private notes, public lectures, and printed books with discussions of artworks, which, for him, embodied the character of particular historical moments. Michelet believed that painting, sculpture, architecture, and engraving bore witness to histories that frequently went untold; that they expressed key ideas standing behind events; and that they articulated concepts that would come to fruition only later. This groundbreaking reevaluation of Michelets approach to history elucidates how writing about art provided a model for the historians relation to, and interpretation of, the past, and thus for a new type of historiographyone that acknowledges and enacts the historians own implication in the history he or she tells.