Discernment or Devotion: Egypt and Sculptural Politics in Eighteenth‐Century France.

This article examines the complex reception and study of ancient Egyptian sculpture in eighteenth-century France, focusing on how these objects were simultaneously valued for their formal and material qualities by connoisseurs and dismissed as idolatrous fetishes tied to despotic religious practices. It highlights the role of collectors and antiquarians, such as Anne-Claude de Tubières, comte de Caylus, who employed empirical connoisseurship to analyze Egyptian small sculptures alongside Greek and Roman antiquities, thereby contributing to early art historical discourse. However, prevailing European prejudices and racialized attitudes framed Egyptian works as sensuous, exotic, and religiously suspect, contrasting them with the idealized purity of Greek marble statuary and influencing the exclusion of Egyptian art from dominant narratives of sculpture. The article also explores how these eighteenth-century debates about materiality, idolatry, and connoisseurship shaped both contemporary and subsequent understandings of Egyptian antiquities and their place within art history.