La venditrice di amorini

When this appeared at the Paris Salon of 1763, it looked like something new, and it had come almost straight out of the ground. Diggers around Vesuvius had been uncovering the buried Roman towns of Herculaneum and nearby Stabiae, and their wall paintings were being published in lavish volumes that educated Europe pored over. Joseph-Marie Vien lifted this scene from one of them, a woman offering little winged cupids for sale from a box as if they were songbirds at market. The clean lines and antique calm were a deliberate turn away from the powdery froth of the Rococo, and the writer Diderot, who reviewed the Salon, admired it. Look at the cupid held up by its wings between finger and thumb, priced and ready to be sold like fruit.