Rich in 400 works, including 300 from the Louvre, the others from museums in Hauts-de-France, the exhibition "Rome. The city and the empire" benefits from the closure of the Roman rooms of the Parisian museum, under construction for two years.

"We take out the masterpieces but we also show statues that have not been seen since the 1930s", explains Martin Szewczyk, one of the curators of the exhibition and curator in charge of Roman sculpture at the Louvre.

Some pieces that were in the reserves have been restored especially for this exhibition, while the masterpieces of this collection have never previously been loaned simultaneously, underlines the director of the Louvre-Lens, Marie Lavandier.

"It is a collection above all artistic, of collectors who have chosen these objects for their exceptional aesthetics above all, (...) but to which we back a great synthesis of the history of ancient Rome for six centuries", she explains.

Statues exhibited at the Louvre-Lens on April 5, 2022 as part of the exhibition "Rome. The city and the empire" Denis Charlet AFP

Covering 2,000 m2, the vast modern rooms of the museum, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, offer the works a much more flexible space than their usual setting in the former apartments of Anne of Austria at the Louvre.

"Romanism"

A large relief which represents the inspection of the entrails of an ox after its sacrifice can thus be reconstituted with its three fragments, against only one exhibited in Paris, details Cécile Giroire, co-curator and director of the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Antiquities. Romans of the Louvre.

She is delighted with the "freedom" offered by this exhibition, experienced as "a laboratory".

In a scenography that evokes a Roman villa, the visitor goes from the monumental marble head of Empress Lucille, a fragment of a seated statue 5 to 6 m high, to graceful little bronzes or jewels.

Statues exhibited at the Louvre-Lens on April 5, 2022 as part of the exhibition "Rome. The city and the empire" Denis Charlet AFP

The common thread is the understanding of "Romanism", in its political and cultural aspects, the basis of a common civilization in a very diverse empire.

The exhibition, until July 25, is enriched with maps and multimedia animations allowing to visualize the expansion of an empire which bordered Scotland like the desert of Sudan.

Thanks to loans from museums in the region, special emphasis is also placed on Belgian Gaul, conquered by Julius Caesar.

With his Roman toga but his thick hair with long locks that identify him as a Gaul, a bust of a young man found near Reims embodies the mixing of cultures, while a gilded bronze Apollo discovered in Seine-Maritime illustrates the influence of Roman public worship in the provinces.

Arts and gladiators

From one room to another, from the republican period to the end of the high empire, if the army and the institutions are mentioned, above all a Roman art of living emerges, which is expressed through art. portraiture, the taste for gladiator fights or even banquets.

A visitor looks at bas-reliefs exhibited at the Louvre-Lens as part of the exhibition "Rome. The city and the empire", April 5, 2022 DENIS CHARLET AFP

Marble sarcophagi discovered in Gaul Aquitaine, a mosaic decorating a dining room in Antioch (Syria) and wall paintings from a villa in Famars (northern France) show the refined way of life adopted by the dignitaries in the provinces.

In a room with black walls in the Pompeian style is exhibited the treasure of Boscoreale: a set of pieces of silver tableware found on the slopes of Vesuvius, with striking goblets decorated with skeletons.

A conference "The Roman Empire for Dummies" and a Roman carnival for the opening weekend should, among other events, complete this journey through time.

Before another great ancient civilization takes over in September, with an exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the deciphering of hieroglyphics by Champollion.

© 2022 AFP