THE COUNT OF CAYLUS (1692-1765) AND THE STUDY OF ANCIENT COINS FRANÇOIS DE CALLATAŸ* The Count of Caylus stands out as a major figure of the eighteenth century. Born at the very foot of the French throne (his mother was a niece of Madame de Maintenon and he grew up in the vicinity of the Sun king), Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières-Grimoard de Pestels Levieux de Lévis, comte de Caylus, had many lives. He quickly renounced the military career he first embraced. He trained himself to be an engraver and attained respectable achievements. Curious by nature, he haunted circles, artistic and not, where few aristocrats of his quality dared to venture. He made a name for himself as the presumed author of many bawdy books (‘littérature paillarde’). A generous benefac- tor since his youth, he sponsored different kinds of artists. Also as a youth he made ‘le voyage en Italie’ and, with years, he increasingly devoted most of his time to antiquities. The days of the last decades of his life were split in two parts: to visit and sponsor his artists during the mornings, such as Edmé Bouchardon or Jean-Marie Vien, and to write about antiquities in the evenings, with very little time devoted to the many entertainments a man of his rank and fortune may have enjoyed (he had a yearly rent of 60,000 French pounds, which may be compared to the 4,000 French pounds given by Choiseul for Barthélemy). A member of both the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1731) and of the Aca- démie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1742), Caylus was very influential in encouraging the revival of Greco-Roman antiquity in the arts against the vapidity of the ‘style rocaille’. A natural target for the Encyclopedists and the instigators of the Enlightenment, he was hated by Diderot who made a cruel epitaph when he died: ‘Ci-gît un antiquaire acariâtre et brusque; ah qu’il est bien logé dans cette urne étrusque!’ (‘here lies a short and cantankerous antiquarian; how well he is housed in this Etruscan urn!’). His reputation faded quickly after his death, and for a long time oscillated between – to take the words of his first biographer – the bad (to have been the incarnation of the losing party of the Antiquarians against the Philosophers) and the worst (to be presumed as the author of bawdy lit- erature). 1 Rediscovered more recently as a potential father of scientific archaeology, Caylus is now involved in another dispute, along with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, propagated by modern commentators who try, sometimes with a touch of nationalistic feeling, to establish a hierarchy be- tween these two characters. 2 When they were alive, Caylus and Winckelmann disliked each other, so it would be easy to establish a catalogue of differences between the two. Caylus himself explicitly made clear his aversion to collecting coins: ‘Wishes are often un- limited: the one for coins is not only the most extended, but the necessity of completing the series we suffer to see incomplete, and the impossibility of gathering the coins already mentioned in other cabinets, are both a matter of grief and disgust I experienced in my youth. These reasons have prevented me from following their study’ (my translation). 3 Still, as a determined antiquarian, Caylus had no problem acknowledging how coins could be helpful in understanding history, all the more since their images and legends are the results of official and contemporary desires. In a compromising and somewhat ambiguous statement, he even dared to place coins before texts, and * I would like to express my warm thanks to my friend Peter van Alfen, who kindly improved my English 1 Rocheblave 1889, p. VII. 2 Ibid., pp. 328-66. 3 Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, grecques, étrusques et romaines (hereafter ‘Recueil’), IV, Paris, 1759, p. 143.