The Aesthetics of Deep Time: Unearthing Georges‐Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's Rococo Shell Grotto and Porcelain Room

Abstract This essay examines Buffon's overlooked 1742 ‘rocaille’ shell grotto and porcelain cabinet at his Burgundian estate. Relying on Buffon's housekeeper Marie‐Madeleine Blesseau's inventory of his belongings, it critically reconstructs and analyses the distribution of the now lost pavilion. Reading its decoration through the lens of Buffon's theories of the Earth, the essay argues that the space invited visitors to partake in a sensorial spectacle of deep time. This sensorial promenade complemented Buffon's descriptions and illustrations of deep time, a phenomenon of considerable temporal scale that could not be experienced first‐hand and required imagination to conceptualise. Analysing Buffon's aesthetic taste as complementary to his geological inquiries challenges the historiographic opposition between the Rococo and Enlightenment science, a binary first constructed by anti‐Rococo critics. Buffon's garden pavilion offers an example of how decoration and natural sciences intersected to generate new understandings of Earth's history and humanity's place within it.