This thesis is a historiographical work which ensues from a study of texts dedicated to Venetian painting, published in French between1800 and 1914. While considering these documents in their diversity (learned works, popularized works and travel stories), its main concern is replacing them in a context of establishment of art history as an independent field of knowledge. Thus, because of its still uncertain status in the 19th century, this discipline feeds on varied literature, and establishes itself at the same time as an institutionalized knowledge. The notion of school of painting appears as a category of this knowledge and allows one to conceive Venetian painting as a singular and coherent phenomenon. Considered for its colour, this school is perceived as a place of sensuality which denies requirements of a doctrine descended from classicism. The art historians of the 19th century set up an argumentative and rhetoric device in order to give to their speech a scientific legitimacy. Beginning in the second half of the century, the use of a scientistic method allows one to explain Venetian painting by social, climatic or racial justifications. Through this reasoning, which demonstrates the anticlassical nature of the Venetian school, it is also advisable to consider the arguments provided by Orientalism and by Flemish and Dutch art history, and which by establishing a parallel with Venice, push it's painting further still from a classical model. However it is further more important to discover the widening of speech bending this dominant thought. The confrontation of Venetian painting with new forms of contemporary art - Romanticism, Impressionism, Symbolism - allows one to create an identification space for pictorial modernity. Finally, the identical demands in Italy in its search of independence and French hostility to Prussia after the 1870 war, take part, around 1900, to the characterization of the Venetian school as a place of anchorage, for a classical, Latin and/or Christian identity resisting to a Germanic threat.
