Revolutionizing the Antique: French Artists and Artistic Community in Napoleonic Rome, 1803-1816

French painters working in Napoleonic Rome were faced with a quandary: how were they to render and interpret the Antique they had been sent to emulate in a newly French city, despoiled of its canonical treasures? In this changed landscape, artists such as Ingres, Blondel, Heim, and Gericault looked to newly excavated Ancient artifacts and sites, to the "restoration" of Ancient Roman monuments by their fellow pensionnaires at the Villa Medici, and to the Roman popolo as descendants of the Ancient Romans to recast the Antique from a traditional Beaux-Arts model to a radically non-canonical, Rome-specific Antique.