Of course, in this exhibition on the forms of ruin at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, we come across paintings by Hubert Robert (1733-1808). This painter, who specialized in the representation of old stones, was nicknamed the "Robert of the ruins" in his time. His Shepherds of Arcadia, trying to decipher an inscription on a mausoleum, and his Discoverers of Antiquities, from the Museum of Valencia, hang in the centre of the exhibition. Of course, the classical and romantic visions of the monuments of Greco-Roman antiquity are treated.
"All men have a secret attraction for ruins," wrote Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity. This feeling is due to the fragility of our nature, to a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the speed of our existence." The sentence, which thus makes the representation of ruin another vanity, is also read at the entrance, and applies to everything that follows. In other words, more than 300 works selected from the historian's reflections...
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