The interim Director of the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, Stéphane Gaillard, is pleased to present the exhibition "A Modern Antiquity", created in collaboration with the Louvre Museum and curated by Jean-Luc Martinez - the President and Director of the Louvre - and Elisabeth Le Breton - Heritage Conservator.

The French Academy in Rome founded in 1666, under the tutelage of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, has always had in its mission the study and dissemination of the "ancient model" in France. The collection conserved in the Gipsoteca of Villa Medici bears witness to this. A Modern Antiquity presents 87 works from the collection of the French Academy in Rome and the Louvre Museum, but also from the Ateliers d'Art of the Réunion des Monuments Nationaux of the Grand Palais, from the Cité de la Céramique Sèvres et Limoges, from the National Library of France, from the Museum of Classical Art of the University of Sapienza and others. The exhibition displays the most important works of Classical and Hellenistic Greece, now disappeared and exhumed from Imperial Rome and subsequently rediscovered during the great works carried out in Renaissance Rome . Fascinated by the important rediscovery of the hundreds of marble statues found, which were prevented from leaving the territory by papal laws, France during the Grand siècle, in the seventeenth century, decided to replicate the statues by making plaster casts. The research works of the Louvre Museum on the materials and techniques used have made it possible to trace the dating and history of this important heritage that has become part of the great French royal and national collections, which are presented in the exhibition "A Modern Antiquity" in a chronological path ranging from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century .