Archaeological Plate from Collection for Book Illustrations, Containing a Rural Feast Scene

Engraving with an archaeological plate from a collection of book illustrations, containing a rural feast scene with a group of men and women, all dressed with draped garments of classical style, and half-human fantastical creatures, such as a centaur, who have stopped by some bare trees to feast on the fruits contained in the set of baskets they carry. One woman is breastfeeding a child in the center of the scene, and another woman offers food from a bowl she holds in her hands to a child that is crawling up a branch above her. 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.