La sculpture lombarde vue depuis la France

Lombardy occupies a special place in French historiography. In the 19th century, it was at the center of debates on the origins of Romanesque art, culminating in Fernand de Dartein's comprehensive work published between 1855 and 1882. The publication in 1915-1917 of Arthur Kingsley Porter's book Lombard Architecture provoked strong reactions from certain French scholars, notably Émile Mâle, who defended the idea that Romanesque sculpture originated in France and contested the early dates proposed by the American researcher. This fruitless debate, which had been superseded in the 1930s by the research of Henri Focillon, only truly came to an end with René Jullian's thesis entitled La sculpture romane dans l'Italie du nord, published in 1945-1949.