Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins

At the Salon of 1796 this canvas hung as number 393, under a short title, Ruins, after the preceding painting. The preceding painting was number 392, Robert's proposal for the same gallery of the Louvre, lit from above and divided by columns. Here that improved hall has fallen in. The vault has gone, sky shows through the broken arches, and the long perspective runs on between stumps of columns to a far opening. People pick through the rubble, a fire smokes among the stones, and in the middle, still on its pedestal, stands a statue an artist is drawing, the Apollo Belvedere.

When Robert exhibited this, the Apollo was still in the Vatican, a statue he had known since his years in Rome. Bonaparte's campaign in Italy that same year opened the way for it to leave. The Pope gave it up under the Treaty of Tolentino, and in July 1798 it was brought into Paris in a procession of crated masterpieces, on its way to the museum Robert had just shown falling apart.