Page - 267 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

utes as depicted in medieval and modern church- es: all of them bear remembrances and represent iconographic survivals originating from the ear- liest times of human art making.36 D’Hancarville thus denies the death of an- cient art, constitutive for the historiography of Caylus and Winckelmann alike, and instead introduces a new, continuous perspective on art history. Consequently, he argues that the most important topic of enquiry for every historian is that of the origins of art. These very origins are, quite logically, seen as the root and cause of all subsequent events, which stem and evolve from this primal scene and are repeatedly related to it by the aforementioned secret influence.37 In light of the hypothesis that the course of history is inescapably determined by its very be- ginnings, it seems quite ironic that d’Hancarville’s new system of a continuous art history, deter- mined ab origine, comes into being only after a radical break with one’s own past. Burying and reinventing oneself seems to be the precise op- posite to his theory of an ongoing, uninterrupt- ed historical course. Of all things, d’Hancarville denies this formative influence of the origins of art in his own biography and instead authorizes himself to step out of this continuous (biograph- ical) history and to begin anew. I wish to argue, however, that this quite ironic, arbitrary self-authorization is key to d’Hancarville’s historiographic operation. What our author suggests by burying and reincarnat- ing himself is that all origins are arbitrarily im- posed events. Arbitrariness is precisely what he attests to the origins of art, too. The beginning of art history, he argues, is marked by the erec- tion of aniconic memorials referring to a certain event or god. These aniconic proto-images might consist, for example, of a rude stone, or the trunk of a tree. The term he uses to denote these objects is signes (signs) and he describes them as presque toujours Arbitraire.38 They are not connected to the persons or the events remembered by them through any mimetic resemblance, but are quite randomly and licentiously created by what one might call the artistic license of human beings. The origins of art, this cause of all history and the crucial key that historiography should strive to uncover, are thus quite ironically dubbed to be arbitrary. The all-determining cause of art ap- pears to draw a blank. This definition can be understood as a stra- tegic and meta-historiographical intervention by d‘Hancarville. When the all-determining ori- gins of art become an arbitrary blank, this void can be filled by a manipulative historiographer who subsequently gains control over history as a whole, as he commands the crucial cause of all subsequent events. D’Hancarville elaborated this idea of history in greater detail in his early Essay de politique et de morale calculée (1752).39 In this book, he tried to develop a mechanism to calcu- late the morale of a people in order to equip a state’s sovereign with a means to educate and im- prove society. To achieve this goal, he does not suggest a reform of the present political and mor- al circumstances and conditions the people are living in, but rather aims towards a manipula- tion of the motives of human behaviour. The lat- ter, he writes, is quite comparable to a physical equation where the result also depends on what one inserts as the first variable.40 The subsequent PaPer monuments for antiquaries 267 36 Ibid., pp. 7, 62, 64, 147ff. 37 [C]e sont ces commencemens qui me semblent si intéressans, l’influence qu’ils eurent sur les progrès que firent les Arts, c’est le germe enfin des grandes choses qu’ils produisirent. (Ibid., s.p. ‘Avant-Propos’) 38 Ibid., p. 39. See also p. 7ff. 39 On this basically unstudied text, see M. Papenheim, En ce monde chacun a sa politique: Aspekte einer Begriffsge- schichte von ‘politique’ in Frankreich vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert, in: Politik: Situationen eines Wortgebrauchs im Europa der Neuzeit (ed. W. Steinmetz), Frankfurt a.M. 2007, p. 162–205. 40 Dans la morale, comme dans la phisique, un mouvement en occasionne toujours un autre, qui produit de nouveaux rap-