Dentro, fuori, sulla soglia. Itinerari dello sguardo in Tableau de Paris (1852-1853)

The two volumes of the Tableau de Paris (1852-1853) by Edmond Texier, richly illustrated with images that already appeared on “L’illustration”, offer an exemplary iconographic repertoire, able to view and comment on the routes proposed by the writer inside the Parisian spaces, resulting in a significant example of literature panoramique. The article wants to highlight the different models of representation, which come into play in the analytic layout of the external and internal spaces (from the eighteenth-century landscape painting to the illustration of the Encyclopédie, from the spectacle of the panoramas to the drawings of the Physiologies) a Paris described in all its aspects of public and private life, and in the multifaceted process of continuous transformation. A real training for the reader to the observation, the elaboration of a topography of the city that binds types to specific urban contexts, Tableau de Paris condenses the story in pictures from illustrated papers offered over the years, recording a cross-section of the capital, when they take the boot haussmanniani demolition. We can not underestimate the impact of this exercise to “gastronomie de l’ il" on an audience that, not having acquired the knowledge and detachment of the flaneur, at least, is trained to read and recognize the iconography of modernity, nor on the other hand ignore the attention of Walter Benjamin to these iconic and literary sources in its revitalization of the figure of the Baudelairian flaneur.