Anatomie du Gladiateur combattant, Paris, Salvage, (1812), coll. A.T.1.6, 1818

Accademia di Belle Arti, Firenze

Professor at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, Jean-Galbert Salvage firmly believed that the level of skill of the Ancient Greeks in sculpture could not have been reached simply by observing bodies from the outside. He was therefore determined to prove that they had resorted to dissection and proceeded to “anatomise” the famous Borghese Gladiator created by Agasias of Ephesus in the First Century BC. Salvage’s enterprise is emblematic of the increasingly morbid aesthetic which gained momentum during the French Revolution, hung between classicism and romanticism, between a taste for Antiquity and fascination for dissection and which was scorned by some contemporary critics as being the “poetry of the graveyard and the abattoir”.