Palette Productions

The description of the Greek world that Homer gave in the 8th century B.C. was long considered as a purely mythological account. However, in the 19th century, Schliemann's archeological finds at Mycenae and Troy changed the picture : it seems that the places described by Homer really did exist. In the early 20th century, Victor Bérard (educated at École normale supérieure, member of the French school of Athens and translater of the Odyssey) undertook to travel round the Mediterranean with the Genevan photographer Boissonnas. His aim : to show that the literary countries of the cyclopes, Aeolus, Circe, Charybdis and Scylla have a geographical reality. His hypothesis : the epic poem about Ulysses must be a sort of "manual" of information for settlers who emigrated to the East in vast numbers at the time of Homer. An invitation to travel? Jean Baronnet could not resist and put his film into the double wake : of Ulysses and of Victor Bérard...

Using a funerary portrait from the Fayum preserved at the Louvre Museum, this documentary explores the art of portrait painting in Roman Egypt during the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. These strikingly realistic faces, painted on wooden panels and placed on mummies, reveal a multicultural society shaped by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions. Through this single portrait, the film reflects on identity, memory, and the human relationship to death.

A fast-paced documentary about a second generation of punk rockers living in Toronto. It offers insight into this segment of culture by videotaping in the streets, bars, and homes of punks. Conversations are intercut with the music of the punk bands at the core of the scene.

Raphael strives to capture the open and sympathetic face of his friend and deliberately simplifies his composition. Yet the image is filled with clues and can be interpreted today using both traditional laboratory analysis and historical archives. The technical details of the pictorial surface, the choice of colors, and the hidden symmetries of the image already reveal how the painting was created. But the clothing, the hairstyle, the materials used, and even the model’s gaze—or the way the reflections are placed in his eyes—each carry a precise meaning within this composition.

La Goulue, the famous cancan dancer at the Moulin Rouge and queen of Belle Époque Paris nightlife, had somewhat fallen from grace. She was now performing at the Foire du Trône. She commissioned her friend Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) to create two panels to decorate her booth. These two works, the largest paintings produced by the artist (1895), would have a dramatic fate. Resold and cut into pieces by a dishonest dealer, they were reassembled in 1929, shortly after La Goulue’s death. Like Manet and Degas, the painter used the technique of painting with essence: the pigments, deprived of oil, are very matte but also much more fragile. The canvases have lost some of their original brilliance, yet they still depict a cast of characters who, like the gods of Olympus and of classical painting, have become truly legendary figures.

At the time Wassily Kandinsky painted Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), he was a professor at the Bauhaus. In this work, the painter applies the principles of color and analytical drawing that he also taught to his students and developed in several theoretical writings. The paintings of this period are highly colorful and highly geometric. The three primary colors and the artist’s favored shapes—triangle, square, circle—become true epic characters. “Form is the outward expression of inner content,” Kandinsky said.

Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne returns to settle there after some journeys elsewhere. He takes as his motif the Sainte-Victoire mountain close by and paints it more than sixty times in different ways and at every time of year. A strange kind of obstination which it was necessary to examine again.

A bit disregarded by the historians, the painter Edouard Vuillard is now finding a place of very first plan in the history of modern art. This film is more particularly interested in Jardins Publics, a serie of nine panels painted in 1874. Five panels are today in Orsay Museum, three others are exhibited somewhere else and the ninth disappeared. Under the apparent simplicity of the themes - women and children in a large park- there is a multitude of historical, technical and plastical riddles. Video tools permit to elucidate a few ones and even to recompose in its colours the panel disappeared during the second world war. And the deciphering of a Vuillard painting drag the spectator into a curious bouncing adventure...

The Pilgrimage to Cythera's island is one of the glories of the Louvre Museum. Praised by Baudelaire, Nerval and Proust, copied by countless painters, continually analysed, it is both legend and utopia. What are those dancing couples doing ? Are they leaving for or coming back from the island of love ?

The primary characteristic of Vermeer’s work is the assimilation of his perspective to a photographic vision. Everything suggests that he made use of the camera obscura to establish the main outlines and perspectives of his paintings, but the use of this precursor to the photographic camera is only one aspect of Vermeer’s art.

This is certainly the most mysterious painting of all the history of painting. Thirty different attempts of finding out the hidden meaning of it have been made without success. The Flagellation is not only the masterpiece of a great artist telling an enigmatic story, it is also the expression of Renaissance's new ideas and art. Piero had a great reputation as a painter and as a mathematician. A few of his paintings show his vast knowledge of perspective. The architecture, the paving, the ceiling, the whole setting of The Flagellation - up to its smallest details - is governed by the laws of perspective. By computing all these datas, it was possible to recreate in three dimensions the exact space that Piero had imagined.

At the end of his career, Ingres brought together 25 nude women in a painting he prepared with great care. The study of the painter’s extensive archives in Montauban, along with laboratory analysis, now makes it possible to reconstruct the history of a work that inspired as much fascination—among artists such as Picasso and Man Ray—as it did repulsion in Paul Claudel, who saw in The Turkish Bath “a pancake of maggots.”

Three cards in hand, gold on the table—we are in the middle of a game of prime, a precursor to poker. Eight gold coins lie before the female player, about a dozen before the young man: the stakes are very high. This painting depicts three card players and a servant; their mouths are closed, their gestures and gazes suspended. The cheat looks directly at the viewer, an ace of diamonds hidden in his belt—his face alone is fully illuminated. His diamond cards suggest money and sexual commerce, while those of his opponent, spades, evoke misfortune and a struggle against fate. In La Tour’s time, several edicts were issued against dice cheats and swindlers. This painting, like The Fortune Teller, illustrates a saying common at the time: “Love, wine, and gambling have ruined more than one man.”

By painting his monumental work The Raft of the Medusa, completed in 1819, Théodore Géricault elevated a news event to the level of modern history painting. A denunciation of cowardice, an admission of human brutality, a fascination with disaster—this ambiguous and unclassifiable work that obsessed the painter echoes one of the greatest scandals of the Restoration and, at the time, creates a new aesthetic.

Who were they burying that day in Ornans ? A gathering of ordinary people, a priest, altor boys, all inhabitants of Courbet's native village. The secrets of a simple funeral ceremony which nevertheless created a scandal in the 1851 Salon.

Is the painting by Giorgiorne or by Titien ? It is difficult to distinguish the work of Giorgione (who died in 1510 at the age of 33) from the early works of Titien (who, for his part died in 1576 at a great age). The Rural Concert which for a long time was attributed to the former is now more willingly attributed to the latter. Analysis of the style, scientific analyses may allow for the hand of one or the other. The mysteries of the scene have done more for the fame of the painting than its uncertain authorship. Why these two naked women beside the two clothed men ? What is the meaning of their gestures ? What music are they playing ? Why that landscape and that flock of sheep ? In order to understand the story and its allusions one must penetrate the learned culture of Venice at the beginning of the 16th century. And also perhaps to compare it with the somewhat contradictory interpretations which modern painters have given such as Manet with his Partie de campagne.

An image that appears ordinary, with a highly explicit subject, can carry troubling undertones. Is it not most strange that this painting may have been created during a religious scene? This final variation on the opposition between sacred love and profane love brings several centuries of religious painting to a close and opens a new era: eroticism is no longer the domain of ancient gods but is shared here and now, in the most everyday setting. With Fragonard, the bedroom and the bed become the most fantastical settings, where accessories—lingerie, cushions, drapery—reshape, on the margins of the action, the folds and recesses of a new, metaphorical geography of love.

Stefano Di Giovanni, nicknamed Sassetta from the 18th century onward, painted this polyptych in Siena between 1437 and 1444 before delivering it, in accordance with his contract, to the Franciscan convent of San Sepolcro near Arezzo. The altarpiece was dismantled starting in 1578, and its various fragments were sold and dispersed. Twenty-six fragments are now scattered across ten museums in London, Berlin, Moscow, and New York… The Louvre Museum holds three of the five panels that made up the main face, as well as two small panels from the predella. Each of these fragments contains numerous clues that make it possible to reconstruct the history of the polyptych and sometimes even to determine their original placement within the whole. Graphic tools and video techniques allow the puzzle to be reassembled and different hypotheses of reconstruction to be presented—hypotheses on which specialists themselves remain divided.

A harbor illuminated by the setting sun in a city of Italian style. On the left, a small temple topped with a clock. In the background, a large Renaissance villa with its four corner towers. On the right, sheltered by a small fort, a large basin reveals a row of tartanes. In the foreground, a shore where two ships are anchored. All around the port, figures stroll, gather, and converse. Positioned high, the viewpoint suggests a spectator looking down over the scene. A perspective effect is created by the convergence of lines toward an area near the center. Colors, the spacing of objects, grazing light, and the perspective of the architecture all combine to produce a powerful illusion of depth. The low sun generates numerous color combinations and transforms the relationships between the usual tones of objects.

A plunge into the strange and fascinating world of Francis Bacon, whose painting struggles to exorcise violence and death. The anguished and very intimate universe of one of the greatest 20th century painters reveals multiple allusions to classical painting.