Élie-Honoré Montagny: The Artist and the Antique

AbstractIn 2004 the Getty Research Institute purchased an album of drawings of antiquities by Elie‐Honore Montagny (1782–1864), a French artist who lived in Italy from 1804 to 1815. The album contains more than four hundred drawings and tracings reproducing antiquities from collections in Rome and Naples. Montagny, a former pupil of Jacques‐Louis David, is relatively unknown and very little information about his life has previously come to light. Archival research undertaken for this essay has made it possible to give a detailed account of his itinerary and to understand the context in which the album in the Research Institute's collection was produced. Studying Montagny reveals a society powerfully focused on the Antique whose most ambitious artists were not necessarily its most successful. Having worked for eminent personalities during the Napoleonic regime, Montagny died in Paris penniless and forgotten. This album is his legacy; the surviving drawings bear witness to the academic taste of the first ha...