Rome / Athens: the two faces of women
under the french revolution

For artists of the late 18th century, antiquity provided a formidable arena of exploration and – above all – projection, where every Athenian or Roman heroine embodied a particular vision of la femme française.

This exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to reflect on the definitions of love as explored by French artists, at a time when poets and painters were attempting to portray love’s emergent emotions: the truest, the most delicate of them all. These games of love and chance played by young people, sometimes shy, sometimes jealous, all dressed “à la grecque “, foreshadow the writings of Musset, Stendhal, and Flaubert. The purity and truth of human feelings were also a way of lifting the leaden shroud that would seem to prevent French women, in the name of moral order, from becoming the sensitive, free beings then so much admired across Europe.