Ancienne ecole de Medecine

Eugène Atget's quest for the architectural remnants of the past embedded in the fabric of the city of his time led him to photograph the domed corner of this deceptively small building. When it was constructed at the beginning of the sixteenth century to house the nascent medical school of the University of Paris, a large room in the dome housed an amphitheater in which classes were taught. After considerable and continual modifications to the building in the following two centuries, the medical school gave it up in 1810. In Atget's day part of the structure was used as a residential hotel, while a wine shop occupied the corner on the intersection. A mezzanine had been inserted into what were originally two-story spaces, perhaps to produce more furnished rooms to rent. The city of Paris bought the building two years before Atget photographed it, and, after alterations in 1910, it served as school housing and then as a library. The building today looks far less picturesque, as it has been thoroughly restored to match its original severe appearance. The shutters, angled chimney flues, and wine shop are gone, and the stone has been scrubbed of paint. Underneath the oversize rococo eyebrow at the right, which in 1898 preposterously overarched two little windows and a pair of merging drainpipes, there is now a great round-topped window like those that lit the original classrooms. Today, in 2021, the building houses the Philanthro-lab, an organization devoted to nurturing philanthropic projects.

Atget's view is alive with quiet incident, from the blurred image of the woman rummaging at the vegetable barrow to the man hesitating on the corner to the dog nosing at the sidewalk. More figures are dimly visible farther in the distance. Atget's instinct to photograph the building as a souvenir of the past was prophetic, for it did not long remain as it was.

Adapted from Eugène Atget, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 12. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.