“Of all beauties!”, a journey concocted by the Louvre and L’Oréal on the representations of beauty through the ages

“Beautiful!”: this is the name of a new route proposed by the Louvre Museum with the support of the L’Oréal group. Through paintings, sculptures or even frescoes and objects, this journey allows visitors to decipher beauty, its practices, its representations and its role throughout the ages and cultures.

It was during a lunch attended by Laurence des Cars, the president and director of the Louvre museum, and Nicolas Hieronimus, the general director of the L'Oréal group, that the idea of ​​creating “Of all beauties!” took shape.

“There were discussions around our common values ​​and the desire to bring contemporary conversations to the Louvre,” explains Delphine Urbach, the Art, Culture and Heritage director of the L’Oréal group, who worked on this journey which should remain in place for three years.

“Of all beauties!”, which is accompanied by a digital application offering audio and interactive content, offers a story through 42 works each with a specific label. Works which, each at their own level, encourage us to question the perception of beauty through the ages, and which sometimes show that certain questions are still relevant today.

The sculpture of theSleeping hermaphrodite based on a Greek original dating from 150 years before Jesus Christ, for example, questions the notion of gender, while the Naked Voltaire by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle dating from 1776, which represents the French writer and philosopher dressed in a simple sheet and represented in the “truth of aging”, thinned face and wrinkled body, pushes us to question age and its representation.

On the communication side, “Beautiful!” will benefit in particular from activations on the social networks of the Louvre Museum and L'Oréal. Furthermore, next February, a web series produced by Thierry Demaizière, in which young people aged 18 to 24 react to the works, will also be broadcast.

This is the first time that global beauty giant L'Oréal has carried out such research alongside the Louvre Museum. Recently, the niche perfume brand Parfums de Marly announced that it was becoming a patron of the Louvre Museum to restore the nobility of a collection of 18th century works. For three years, the brand is committed to working alongside the museum in a project intended to bring light to a wing of the art objects department: the Cressent rooms.