FIONA GATTY Beauty and Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century French Art Criticism 1801-1824 As the inheritors ofeighteenth-century rationalism, the writers and think- ers of early nineteenth-century France had been educated and brought up with the language of metaphysics and a drive to define, in particular, what constituted beauty in art. The tumultuous events of Revolutionary France and the public nature of the debate about beauty, which included the wholesale ransacking of treasures from the Vatican, theflte revolution- naire, the Roman Triumph of 1798 and the de-secularization of treasures that represented both the Ancien Regime and the Catholic Church, set the tone for an approach to the concepts of beauty and monstrosity that extended beyond the purely Christian values of goodness and evil. Key to the metaphysical debate in France was the work of J.J. Winckelmann (1717-1768), whose History of the Art ofAntiquity had been translated from the original German and published, along with other works by him in France in 1766,1781,1784,1786,1794, and 1802.. 1 Winckelmann's history of the origins of art, and the 'perfection' of art under the Greeks provided rationalist Europe with a system that not only catalogued the treasures of ancient sculpture, but which also attempted to elucidate the core essence of art and provide a definition of beauty that was presented in a metaphysical format that clearly separated it from both Christian ethics and what was regarded as the excesses of baroque art and theAncien Regime. By 18 01, with Napoleon's ascent to the position of First Consul, the relationship between politics and art had begun to shift. Napoleon, like his predecessors in government, realized that the arts had an important role JohannJoachimWinckelmann, Histoire de tart de l'antiquite, trans. by Michel Huber (Leipzig: Jean Gottt. Imman. Breitkopf, 1781).