Exhibition – Antiquity rediscovered, treasures from the Cabinet des Livres

Through some twenty prestigious volumes, the Book Room highlights the various ways in which Greek and Roman antiquity was been talked about, handed down, revisited and interpreted from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century.

The Duc d’Aumale received the five volumes of Iconographie Grecque and Iconographie Romaine by Ennio Quirino Visconti as a prize in the Concours Général of 1839. He never stopped adding to his collection of first editions of the great classical texts and
splendid art books on antiquity.

His erudition, combined with the contemporary passion for archaeology and collections of antiquities, led him to document all the periods and techniques of antiquity, seen as a subject of study, but also as a model and a call to distant climes.