Mythologies
The 1760s marked a new interest in ancient Greek and Roman history, prompted by the archaeological discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the German writer Winckelmann's neo-classical theories. This tendency was embodied in a taste for classical history, which by the end of the 18th century, inspired artists to reconstruct costumes and decors from antiquity with ever greater fidelity.
The neoclassicism of Vien, master of Taillasson, is symptomatic of the intrusion of sensuality and hedonism in the subjects painted. Mythological scenes were often a pretext for representations of nakedness evoked with delicacy and refinement (see Love fleeing slavery, Augustins museum). Although the mythological genre gave way to the portrayal of contemporary history at the beginning of the 19th century during the Empire, the Fine Arts academy and art instruction in general remained profoundly attached to Greek and Latin culture. The subjects chosen for the Prix de Rome stand in proof of this.
Classical literature, exulted by Ingres in the Apotheosis of Homer, painted for the ceiling of the Clarac room at the Louvre, remains a source of rich inspiration that attracted romanticists and classicists like Abel de Pujol, a pupil of David and Prix de Rome in 1810, whose subject, the Propoetides changed into rock is borrowed from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
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