Ashes to Ashes

Let's dust off Gibbon.

The artist’s obsession with degeneration earned him the nickname “Robert of the Ruins.” Here, he transfers the sublimity and majesty of ancient remains depicted by his Italian contemporaries (most notably Panini) to contemporary Paris: the Louvre’s Grand Gallery. We see Michelangelo’s Dying Slave (right), the Apollo Belvedere (left), the head of Minerva and a statue of Zeno (left). Robert’s descriptive powers earned him acclaim in his own day. A contemporary noted that his works “fill the soul with a kind of melancholy . . . leading it through the scattered remains of a long succession of accumulated centuries.”