Visualizing History in Eighteenth-Century France

This essay explores an impulse to visualize history in eighteenth-century France. It focuses on massive compilations of printed images that assembled overviews of history as represented by artifacts, portraits, and events and compares that documentary mode of visualizing the past to imaginary reconstructions of historical events in illusionistic scenes as depicted in the radically different formats of book illustration and monumental history painting. (C) The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.