Diana’s story above the room

Lift your eyes towards the painted decoration. In the Salle de Diane, the building offers a story of its own above the sculptures. The large painting is by Léonor Mérimée, a French painter working in the early nineteenth century. Its subject brings together several figures from classical myth. Diana, the goddess of the hunt, returns a young man called Hippolytus to Aricia after the healing god Asclepius has brought him back to life. Keep that simple sequence in mind as you look: a return to life, followed by a reunion. You can read the picture through the relationships between its figures without trying to memorise every name. Now notice the place given to the painting within the room. Its broad, elevated surface makes the story part of the setting through which you move. Looking around the Louvre often means shifting between an object and the architecture that frames it. Here, a moment spent looking above the freestanding works reveals another artist, another period and another way of imagining the ancient world.