Balthazar-Georges Sage and the Controversy on Animal Respiration: the Portrait of a Counter-Experiment (1777)

This article reconstructs an overlooked episode in the history of eighteenth-century chemistry: the public confrontation between Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Balthazar-Georges Sage during Joseph II’s visit to the Académie des Sciences in May 1777. On that occasion, Sage challenged Lavoisier’s experiments on animal respiration by staging a dramatic “resuscitation” of an asphyxiated sparrow with volatile alkali—an event he immediately sought to publicise through print and image, including a little-known portrait painted that same year by Jean-François Colson. Drawing on unpublished archival material, contemporary press coverage, and the visual and textual strategies used by Sage, the article analyses the performative dimensions of scientific self-representation and controversy. It reassesses Sage’s place within late Enlightenment chemistry, showing how experimental prestige, patronage networks, and printed media circulation shaped scientific reputations. The portrait appears as an important element in a broader campaign of self-promotion whose rapid eclipse illustrates the unstable dynamics of celebrity in the scientific culture of the late eighteenth century.