Les guides de maisons d'écrivains et d'artistes: Les débuts (1780-1840)

Writers’ and artists’ residences developed into museums only at the end of the eighteenth century, when houses inhabited by Walpole, Rousseau and Petrarch as well as Canova’s birthplace were turned into tourist destinations. This shift is apparent in the guidebooks to these mansions published in the decades between 1780 and 1840, booklets on which this paper focuses in order to highlight the long-term transformations of the phenomenon of the writers’ and artists’ house. Initiated in the early sixteenth century when houses linked to Petrarch and Erasmus started to attract important flows of visitors, and stimulated by the later habit to pay homage to illustrious intellectuals in their private dwellings, only after 1780 yet just before the rise of organised tourism facilitated by guides like the ones published by John Murray after 1830, houses linked to widely admired creative men changed into realities specifically designed to attract and accommodate visitors. In order to investigate this shift and to analyse the museological settings it engendered in the various houses, this paper discusses the guidebooks to Horace Walpole’s Twickenham villa (1784), Petrarch’s country house in Arquà close to Padua (1797 and 1830), the villa and gardens designed by Melchiorre Cesarotti in Selvazzano also close to Padua (1810), Les Charmettes near Chambéry (1811) and Canova’s studio/residence/museum in Possagno in the Venice area (1837). Beyond establishing the museum reality described in these guidebooks, the layout for their spaces and artworks, as well as their visit routes, this paper also aims to understand these texts within an autobiographical narrative tradition verging on auto-celebration, from Paul Jove’s Elogia (1551), Constantijn Huygens’s Hofwijck poem (1653), to La maison d’un artiste by Edmond de Goncourt (1880) and La casa della vita by Mario Praz (1958).