The closure, for two years of renovation, of the Roman rooms of the Louvre makes one happy: the Lensois little brother of the Parisian museum, which, for its 10 years of existence, is taking advantage of this “liberated collection”according to the expression of Marie Lavandier, the director of the Louvre-Lens.
It is really a release for more than 300 masterpieces – to which are added a hundred pieces from the museums of the region to evoke the Roman presence in Belgian Gaul – because, in Paris, installed in the sumptuous apartments of Anne of Austria, they were as if overwhelmed by heavy architecture, painted ceilings and gilding. As if reduced to their role as beautiful objects, without us seeing in them much more the testimony of a civilization that dominated the Mediterranean basin for centuries and whose imprint we still retain today.
Nothing like this in Lens, where the sober scenography recreates, thanks to refined porticoes, a real forum atmosphere such as can be felt in Pompeii. The two curators of the exhibition – Cécile Giroire, director of the department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities at the Louvre Museum, and Martin Szewczyk, heritage curator and specialist in Roman statuary in the said department – had “carte blanche to offer a fairly general overview of Roman civilization”assures Cécile Giroire.
The project is successful, which shows how a city on the banks of the Tiber, a city like there were so many in ancient Italy, became a dominant empire “an immense space, from the Scottish border to the Sudanese desert and from Atlantic Morocco to present-day Armenia”to use Martin Szewczyk’s description.
“The other peoples received land with definite borders; for Rome, City and Universe have the same extent”, wrote the Latin poet Ovid, pointing out that the Roman system and spirit had spread throughout the empire. Despite its gigantic size, it had absorbed the ferments of political, military, religious and cultural unification.
Everything can perhaps be read in the great historical relief called “of Domitius Ahenobarbus”, where we witness both the census of the citizens, an act by which the city counts and classifies its forces, and the preparation, under the supervision of warriors, of suovetaurilethis ceremony where three male animals – a pig (their in Latin), a sheep (ovis) and a bull – were sacrificed to Mars, god of violence and war, the only one capable of protecting the people. The success of Rome is to have exported its model everywhere, to have made all the provinces, all the cities, “living cells” (according to the expression of the curators of the exhibition) of a larger body which was the empire.
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