Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds
Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani, editors
An exploration of the role of graphic work in the career of one of the nineteenth century’s most influential architects. Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was nineteenth-century France’s most prominent architect and restorer. This groundbreaking study examines how he used drawing and printmaking as a mode of seeing and thinking and as a means to intensify relationships by capturing the vitality of historical worlds and hidden analogies between human culture and the natural realm. Making sense of Viollet-le-Duc’s vast graphic production, scholars consider his imaginative recreations of the most minute aspects of medieval warfare; his approach to the practical tasks of restoring very complex medieval monuments; his experiments in new means of publicly diffusing architectural ideas in the yearly Parisian salons, in didactic manuals, and in children’s books; and even a fantastic project to restitute the original structure of the formidable massif of Mont Blanc. The gamut of techniques employed by Viollet-le-Duc stretches from large painted tableaux to lithographs, steel engravings, woodcuts, gouaches, tracings, and full-scale details. This generously illustrated volume offers an unparalleled window into the architect’s working process and explores how his mastery of the graphic arts helped him harness the power of the press to disseminate architectural knowledge and spread ideologies based on antagonism, most notably nationalism and racism.
Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Martin Bressani is William Macdonald Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University
The exhibition Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds is on view at Bard Graduate Center Gallery from January 28 – May 24, 2026
Table of Contents
Bard Graduate Center Director's Foreword
Susan Weber
Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie Director’s Foreword
Gilles Désiré Dit Gosset
Introduction
Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani
Part I
1. Drawing as Restoration
Martin Bressani
2. Drawn to Exhbit: Viollet-le-Duc and the Culture of Display
Barry Bergdoll
Part II
3. A Collection without Equal: The Viollet-le-Duc Archive at the Médiathèque du patrimone et de la photographie
Jean-Charles Forgeret
4. The Past Drawn: Percier's Absorption versus Viollet-le-Duc's Distancing
Jean-Philippe Garric
5. Travel Watercolors: Possible Sources
Jean-Michel Leniaud
6. Genesis, Transportation, and Reproduction: The Diffusion of Viollet-le-Duc's Graphic Work in Baron Taylor's Voyages pittoresques
Ségolène Le Men
7. Illuminating Picardy
Stephen Bann
8. Paper Work: The Site Drawings
S. Diane Daussy and Arnaud Timbert
9. Medium, Media, Mediation: Viollet-le-Duc's Graphic Techniques
Peter Sealy
10. Viollet-le-Duc's Satirical Streak
Laurent Baridon
11. Demonstrating Ornament: Teaching through Drawing
Estelle Thibault
12. Representing Racial Histories in Viollet-le-Duc's Histoire de l'habitation humaine
Irene Cheng
13. Le Massif du Mont Blanc: Methods of Observation and Reconstruction for the Architect-Geologist
Aisling O'Carroll
Plates
14. The Taormina Theater in "A Finished State, Which May in Fact Never Have Actually Existed"
Bérénice Gaussuin
15. A Forgotten Monstrance by Viollet-le-Duc
Gaël Favier
16. Illustration of an Iris in the Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle
Ralph Ghoche
17. The Belfry
Antoine Picon
18. Passing the Baton: Viollet-le-Duc's Histoire d'un dessinateur and the Education of the Eye
Shana Cooperstein
19. Restoring Notre-Dame de Paris in the Nineteenth Century and Today
Barry Bergdoll in conversation with Philippe Villeneuve
Checklist of the Exhibition
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Photographic Credits
| Expected release date is 5th Jan 2026 |
Other Details
ISBN
9780300284485
Page count
410
Publication date
January 2026
Binding
Hardcover: paper over board
