PERATÈ, JOSEPH ANDRÉ. - Archaeologist and art critic, born in Nancy in 1862, died in 1947.
For two years he was a member of the Ecole française in Rome; in 1889 assistant curator and subsequently curator of the Musée national de Versailles, to whose reorganization he contributed actively; later honorary curator of the Musées nationaux. He produced the first handbook of Christian archaeology, Les papes et les arts, in the work Le Vatican in collaboration with G. Goyau and P. Fabre (Paris 1895); also Le Musée national de Versailles in collaboration with P. de Nolhac (there 1896); La peinture au Salon (there 1897); Versailles (there 1904); Les petites fleurs de St François d'Assise, in an edition illustrated by Maurice Denis in 1911; a translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia (1923); and a biography: St François d'Assise (Paris 1929).
He wrote several chapters in A. Michel’s Histoire de l'art, vols. I-VIII (Paris 1906-1929), V. indice; Les travaux d'archéologie chrétienne en France, in the Proceedings of the III International Congress of Christian Archaeology (Rome 1934, pp. 159-67). Cirillo Vogel