The term Querelle des anciens et des modernes (Dispute of the ancients and moderns) covers a multitude of controversies and polemical writings of the 17th and 18th centuries that compared modern art, literature, scholarship, and science with the accomplishments of Greco-Roman antiquity and claimed superiority for one or the other (see also Antiquity, reception of). The querelle revolved around the classicist question of whether the present was superior to antiqui…