Archaeological Plate from Collection for Book Illustrations with a Couple Riding a Chariot Led by Dragons

Engraving with an archaeological plate from a collection of book illustrations, containing a couple riding a Roman chariot led by a group of dragons or other fantastical creatures with snake-like necks and heads. The man wears a Roman military dress, and the woman wears a draped dress and holds a paper scroll in front of her. This illustration is inside a round frame with small, semi-abstract acanthus leaves. This kind of archaeological plate, illustrating neoclassical scenes with subjects from Ancient Rome and Greece, was characteristic of French art in the eighteenth century, where a renewed interest in classical antiquity was fostered by both the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the increasing importance of the Grand Tour, in which the "cognoscenti" (persons of culture and sensibility) traveled to study the monuments of Roman and Greek Antiquity. Archaeological plates like this would have been printed in illustrated books with detailed descriptions of freshly discovered ruins, in an effort to retrieve the glories of lost civilizations and disseminate the style that would come to characterize the neoclassical taste in the arts.