The Museum’s Renaissance Revisited: Histories, Objects, Exhibits

Abstract

EXHIB IT ING MICHELANGELO Until 1849, the Parisian Museum of the Renaissance presented Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave (1513–15)—the two almost finished captives created for Pope Julius II’s famously unfinished tomb—as the centerpiece of a carefully curated selection of French and Italian sculpture, culminating in the work of Napoleon’s favorite neoclassical sculptor, the recently deceased Venetian artist Antonio Canova (1757–1822). The two sculptures arrived in the museum in 1793, confiscated from the widow of Cardinal Richelieu’s descendant, as the Louvre opened its doors to the nation. Michelangelo called the two captives “prisoners” (prigioni). After their migration to France in themid-sixteenth century, theywere described in 1624 as “Michelangelo’s