'Emotional Afterlives and Counter-Cultural French Renaissances - Schongauer, Fouquet and Quarton Reloaded, 1875-1905'

This article concerns three ‘French’ Renaissances – those of Martin Schongauer, Jean Fouquet and Enguerrand Quarton between 1875 and 1904. Of these three, only Fouquet’s late nineteenth-century revival has been the subject of scholarly attention. Of the other two, one has been borrowed as ‘French’ – that of the German artist, Martin Schongauer – and both have remained neglected. Moreover, not one of the three has had the emotional field of their reception considered as a focus of interest, despite new studies on Renaissance affects (Meek and Sullivan 2015), ‘performing’ emotions (Maddern, McEwan and Scott 2018) and the role of emotions in responses to historical periodization (Lynch and Broomhall 2021: 2). Evoked as frequently turbulent, often melancholy, prideful, exalted, erotic, even hateful, but rarely indifferent, this article aims to illuminate three Northern artist ‘Renaissances’ as active objects of cult, pathos and contested memory, considering the ways in which the centrality of emotions in the uses of their histories and recreations contributed to this transformation. It examines their pivotal, yet neglected, French Third Republic appropriations which are implicated, on the one hand, in constructing new cultural identities of Republican ‘nation-hood’. Yet on the other, is the sharpened potency of these Renaissances and their objects of fascination to create counter-cultural, emotive histories of recovery, in particular, of belonging.