Charles-Louis Clérisseau

Charles-Louis Clérisseau (28 August 1721 – 9 January 1820) was a French architectural draughtsman, antiquary and artist. He had a role in the genesis of neoclassical architecture during the second half of the 18th century.

Born in Paris, he was a pupil of the painter of ruins Giovanni Paolo Pannini and a former student at the French Academy in Rome, which he left in 1754 after a dispute with its director, Natoire. In 1755 the Scottish architect Robert Adam arrived in Florence, where he met Clérisseau, who accompanied him to Rome; there Adam resolved, under the spell of Clérisseau, to produce a volume for publication upon his return that would establish him as a serious architect. The project he selected was a volume documenting the ruins of Diocletian's Palace at Split, easily accessible on the Dalmatian coast. Over a period of five weeks in 1757 Adam sketched and supervised the documentation of the ruins, while Clérisseau produced perspectives, and two German draftsmen undertook the measured drawings. Most of the published engravings in Adam's Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalato (1764) are believed to be the work of Clérisseau, though he received no credit.

Clérisseau passed most of the next decades in Rome. As it had done since the High Renaissance, ancient Rome and modern Rome functioned as a cultural hub, the ruins of Classical Antiquity providing a school in themselves, if one had a knowledgeable guide. Clérisseau served as a mentor to a generation of young architectural students who had won the prestigious Prix de Rome for study at the French Academy in Rome and guided the developing taste for the Antique in young French and British artists and gentlemen amateurs on the Grand Tour. In particular, his skillful drawings of ancient architectural details, of real Roman ruins and imaginary ones, helped form the taste of young architects like Robert Adam in the 1750s and his brother James Adam, in 1760-63. Clérisseau supported himself by providing architectural views, sometimes in series, for young men on the Grand Tour.

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