Voltaire's Room, 39 portraits
by Anya Belyat-Giunta
- Printed in France
* UNE RÉDUCTION DE 15% s'applique aux communes de moins de 5 000 habitants.Contactez-nous pour bénéficier de cette remise.
* POUR TOUTES LES COMMUNES, une réduction de 10% s'applique automatiquement à partir de 3 expositions commandées.
Exhibition available in 2 formats for outdoor use and 1 format for indoor use.
During a group exhibition at the Château de Maisons-Laffitte, Anya Belyat-Giunta discovered that Voltaire had stayed there several times.
In 1723, the writer and philosopher even remained bedridden there for a long time, spending several days between life and death. The famous doctor Gervasi, who had just fought the plague in Gévaudan, inflicted many bloodlettings and purges on Voltaire, but above all, he made him ingest no less than two hundred pints of lemonade. Voltaire survived both the illness and the treatments. He left the castle, before learning later that the room he had occupied and where he had almost died had been devastated by a fire...
It took no less twists and turns and coincidences to pique Anya Belyat-Giunta's curiosity.
Stubbornly digging into the Voltaire vein, she learned that upon the philosopher's death at the age of eighty-four, his friend, the Marquis de Villette, had ordered his heart to be removed and placed in a gilded metal box filled with an alcoholic preparation.
On the box, an inscription: "Heart of Voltaire, died in Paris, May 30, 1778".
The casket was then transported to the Château de Ferney, which Voltaire had acquired in 1758 and where he had resided for twenty years before ending his life in the capital. The heart remained on display until the Revolution in the room known as "Voltaire's Heart Room," on the walls of which it is said that 41 portraits of Voltaire's friends watch over the memory of the great man...
Two engravings bear witness to these benevolent friendships, two engravings which are the starting point of Anya Belyat-Giunta's work, Chambre Voltaire, 39 portraits...
• Outdoors: choose locations where people take a walk and/or where there is a lot of foot traffic: in the centre of the town, near a school, in a public garden or along a walking trail... And if possible, on flat ground!
• Indoors: reception hall, office, waiting room, dining room, meeting room - choose the best-lit space.
CAUTION: If the space where you are displaying the exhibition is slightly damp, we recommend purchasing eight simple frames of the same size (50 x 70 cm) to protect the prints.
The papers we have chosen for printing our exhibitions meet two essential criteria, among others: beautiful colour rendering and durability.
• Exhibitions intended for outdoor display are printed on high-quality 130gsm blue-backed paper.
• For exhibitions intended for indoor display, we have chosen a 550gsm semi-rigid paper to which we attach a simple hanging system. These panels can therefore be hung on a single nail or framed if they are to be displayed in a slightly damp location.
For outdoor displays, our poster formats have been chosen to best suit “election” billboards:
• Large outdoor format (84 x 119 cm) for maximum impact. With one poster per billboard, you will need eight in total.
• Small outdoor format (63 x 93 cm) so that two posters can be placed on the same billboard... meaning you only need to install four billboards.
• Indoor exhibition (50 x 70 cm): 8 prints to hang on 5 linear metres of free wall space.
Full view of the exhibition
