Leniaud, Jean-Michel
Neo-Gothic between Art and Industry: The Dream Accessible to All
- 2005.
2
The 19th century invented the neo-medieval dream, made of total art and of a unanimist society. It first experiments with architecture, with monumental renovation works and campaigns promoting the building of new churches. The idea that artistic production must allow to meet with everyone needs – that the singular dream may become the dream of all – first appears in the field of decorative arts: Viollet-le-Duc develops, concerning that matter, the theory of rationalism and the project of industrialised production; manufactures of Christian art multiply in the old and new worlds; factories and religious communities order from catalogues. Thus starts a project of alphabetization for a universal church, of mass evangelization through the object, efficient enough to leave more than traces even nowadays.