Pierre-Jean Mariette

In 1722 he first met the immensely rich patron of the arts Pierre Crozat, whom he advised, whose collection he catalogued and from whose sale he purchased outstanding drawings.

Everywhere the affable, curious and sociable Mariette made acquaintances and formed contacts with the scholarly and artistic community in Europe, which he maintained through correspondence.

The firm had published Pierre Fauchard's Le chirurgien dentiste, ou traité des dents 1728, the first modern work on dentistry and a milestone of medical history,[4] By 1750 he sold the family business that he had inherited in 1744, in order to purchase the office of Contrôleur Général de la Grande Chancellerie, a sinecure that allowed him to devote the rest of his life to his researches and to increasing his celebrated collection.

These "Spencer Albums" of Mariette's prints are one of the most important acquisitions made by the Harvard University Art Museums in recent years.

In 1764-65 he got into a public dispute in the pages of the Gazette littéraire de l'Europe with Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whom Mariette admired greatly as an artist, over Piranesi's polemical stand that the magnificence of Roman art derived from its Etruscan roots, rather than from its Greek borrowings [10] Mariette's circle of friends was large, included Andre-Charles Boulle and was broad enough to define the state of art connoisseurship in France during his time, beginning with the circle he met at the houses of the prodigious collection Pierre-Antoine Crozat, where besides artists like Antoine Watteau and the classicizing sculptor Edmé Bouchardon, Mariette met the abbé de Maroulle and the comte de Caylus, who helped sharpen his eye.

He acquired a country house at Croissy, which he named "Le Colifichet"[11] was ennobled during the reign of Louis XV, and honored with the Order of the Saint-Esprit.

An exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in 1967 drew together materials to honour his memory, occasioning a rich catalogue and a vita by the editor of The Burlington Magazine;[13] it provoked a resurgence of scholarly interest in the history of taste and the role of other Parisian taste-makers, such as the marchands-merciers, like Edme-François Gersaint.