La légèreté et le grave

The 18th century begins with Antoine Watteau's The Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera and ends with Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat: the birth of the gallant feast versus the agony of a revolutionary tribune. Two masterpieces that illustrate the lightness and gravity of a century, two antagonistic but complementary facets of the same era. The ten works described here are milestones that allow us to understand this exciting century in all its countless contradictions: they all correspond to a moment in the 18th century and narrate its artistic, cultural, philosophical, social, economic and, of course, political history. So many masterpieces that forged a new society, enamoured with freedom, independence and transgression, throughout a century that, under the sensitive pen of Cécile Berly, oscillates incessantly between a wisely maintained lightness and a gravity that borders on drama. 

ISBN: 9782379334009