Salammbô

Description

"It was in Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar. "The first sentence of Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbô, published in 1862, marked the beginning of a unique experience for generations of readers. In a demiurgic attempt to restore the lost city, the writer stages human passions and gives birth to a whirlwind of images and sensations that will unleash the imagination of artists from the end of the 19th century until today.
Painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, film-makers, comic strip authors: they all took up Salammbô to transpose the words that Flaubert did not want illustrated. On the occasion of the bicentenary of the writer's birth, this book and the exhibition it accompanies undertake to reveal the considerable scope of this masterpiece of modern literature and its legacy in the history of the Mediterranean.