Têtes de femmes Grecques, ornées du Nimbe

Engraving with designs for hair ornaments, part of the book "Choix de costumes civils et militaires des peuples de l'antiquité..." (Selection of civic and military costumes of peoples from antiquity...), written and engraved by Nicolas-Xavier Willemin between 1798-1802. This plate is the 41st of the third part of the book, on Costumes of European peoples, and contains a variety of female heads wearing the "Nimbe", a type of gold band that would wrap around the woman's hair several times, sometimes used to hold pieces of fabric that would be placed on the woman's forehead, leaving some loose hairlocks near the forehead and behind the neck. The plate contains a design for a golden Nimbe above, and five motifs with female heads, wearing different designs of Nimbes.

This kind of plate, often called "archaeological", and illustrating neoclassical scenes with subjects from Ancient Rome and Greece, was characteristic of French art towards the end of 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.