During Napoleon's rule, Freemasonic circles in France invented rituals that allegedly first took place in the temple structures of ancient Egypt. This book looks at the cultural environment and intellectual background of the pseudo-Egyptian secret society the Sacred Order of the Sophisians. Founded in Paris in 1801, the Sophisian Order initially catered to veteran military leaders, Egyptologists, scientists, writers, and artists who had joined Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798--1801). Soon the order branched out to attract new adepts from the world of the Parisian stage. This study is based...

Taking its cue from Horace s saying As is painting, so is poetry ( Ut pictura poesis ), Marc Fumaroli s treatise "What Language to Say the Arts?" revisits the genesis of the conceptual turn in art. Fumaroli argues that the roots of this transition run deeper than the twentieth-century conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Rather, the origins of conceptual art can be found in the emergence of aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophy in eighteenth-century Germany, a time when writers, such as Lessing, Baumgarten, Winckelmann, and Kant, tried to analyze art from a purely...