This is the story of how German writers, scholars, bureaucrats and custodians of art at all levels witnessed and participated in the French despoliations of European art collections over the course of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and how in the aftermath of these events they developed new ideas about the place and purpose of art in modern cultural and political life at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this period German scholars were forming new theories about the autonomy of art and its ability to remake the social and political order. At the same time they were gaining unprecedented experience of art’s material fragility and its dependence on the contingencies of the environment and good will of human actors. This dissertation argues that the tension between the twin discoveries of art’s powers and its limitations defined the cultural politics of the Prussian state during this revolutionary era.

This dissertation begins with the looting of Italian and German art collections by French officials from 1794-1807, and investigates Germans’ confrontation with the vulnerability of the objects thought to be the source of ideal beauty in the world to material displacement in the tumult of military conflict and occupation. The second chapter turns to the German reaction to the museum founded in 1793 in the Palace of the Louvre in which the collections won through battle were exhibited to a broad and international public. In the face of the brilliance and innovativeness of this museum, German visitors rethought their repulsion to the despoliations and articulated new visions for the methods and contexts under which art could be known and appreciated. The silence of art and the difficulty of getting it off its pedestal is the subject of the third chapter, which takes up the challenges for Prussian delegates of identifying, reclaiming, and returning looted artworks to German cities and towns after the fall of the Napoleonic regime. The last two chapters are about the promise, forwarded by aesthetic theorists and cultural administrators, that once back in German custody, looted art objects would achieve new vitality, becoming vibrant participants in the cultural life of the state. In Prussia this achievement was to be secured by the establishment of a centralized public museum of art, an institution that hoped to abandon the chaotic, limited, dangerous, and frustratingly silent material basis of art in favor of a realm of pure ideal aesthetic experience. “To the Vandals they are stone!” Schiller wrote of the antiquities in Paris, expressing the desire not only to transcend the object but to cordon off art’s materiality as the domain of those unable to experience its true spiritual charge. The assessment, however, both enlightens and deceives. Indeed, to the Vandals they were stone—the various transgressions against art objects which we will encounter in the following could not be conceived as such without the bottom line of art's materiality. To be an object in this period was a deeply vulnerable proposition. At the same time, however, the object was not only the purview of the victor, but also the ultimate concern of the vanquished. The problem and, I will argue, fundamental impossibility of escaping from this truth—of making stone transform into something beyond itself—became in this moment the defining paradox of the museum of art in the nineteenth century. The inheritance of this history continues to inform and challenge museum practices today.