This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. chapter 5 157 The Republic of Letters Mapping the Republic of Letters that communicated primarily in Latin, though increasingly also in German, as the authors' bibliographies show; the foreigners in the Bilder-Sal are Italian antiquarians such as Scipione Maffei (1675-1755) and Ludovico Muratori (1672-1750) rather than French philosophes. This chapter is concerned with the Bilder-Sal and its

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... ntury antecedents as collective representations of the Republic of Letters. The most prominent among these antecedents -effectively, its French counterpart from half a century earlier -is Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle (The illustrious men who appeared in France during this century, 1696-1700) by Charles Perrault (1628-1703). It is a collection of a hundred portraits and biographies in two folio volumes, eulogizing the churchmen, generals, statesmen, authors, and artists that contributed to the glory of France and of Louis XIV.2 The other collection that most closely resembles Brucker's both in format and in content is Isaac Bullart's (1599Bullart's ( -1672) ) less prestigious, but more encompassing Académie des Sciences et des Arts (Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1682). It contains 275 portraits along with "the lives & historical eulogies of 2 A revised edition appeared in 1700; five further eighteenth-century editions without portraits are listed by David Culpin in Perrault, Les Hommes Illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle, avec leurs portraits au nature, ed. D. Culpin (Tübingen: 2003) xiv-xv.