The 'manière Gottique': Jean-Baptiste Descamps and the revival of early Netherlandish art in eighteenth-century France *

This article explores the now little-known writings of Jean-Baptiste Descamps on the early Netherlandish artists the Van Eycks, Hans Memling, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden and others. Setting Descamps's commentaries firmly in the context of the eighteenth-century French art world, it demonstrates that this interest was stimulated not by the art itself but by a fascination with the genre of artists' Lives, and by the turn to Van Mander's Schilder-boeck as an alternative to Vasari. By tracing the evolution of this phenomenon from Félibien onwards, the article reveals a context for the Napoleonic looting of Van Eycks and Memlings in the 1790s.