Ils peignaient nos statues

For more than two centuries, archaeology has indeed unearthed numerous traces of colors and research continues thanks to the technological improvement of examination and analysis tools. Neither white when new, nor patinated by time, ancient marble statues were indeed polychrome.

But while the Ancients painted their statues, we have developed another imagination. In particular, the copies and casts, the references to antiquity in contemporary art from yesterday to today, which very rarely integrate the original polychromy of the statues. Voluntary act, simple mistake or unanticipated consequence, it is a whole heritage that we should reconsider today.

So, how do the institutions that preserve our heritage share this knowledge in their exhibition itinerary? What mediation is offered at the museum? And how do visitors take hold of it? Rewriting a heritage, is it moreover only a matter of knowledge? To answer these questions, we conducted the survey.

This survey was conducted as part of a doctoral thesis in museology. Written in the first person, the exhibition traces this singular, but no less collective, research in four stages:
- Being surprised by a curiosity
- Collecting points of view
- Building a reflection
- Submitting an interpretation

Come and discover the collections of the Nice Archaeology Museum through an exhibition mixing documentary and fictional register, in which the collections rub shoulders with second-hand objects, photographic archives, video projections and of course, some hypothetical reconstructions.