indeed, in chardin's world of middle-class people are the men and women who would attempt to take powern the revolution half a century on. the age of reason would find its means of expression by returning to the source-- to classical greece. the art of the 18th century is often called neo-classicism, but we shouldn't understand that in the sense of a slavish imitation of classical models. the monuments of classical antiquity had inspired artists from the renaissance onwards. the appollo belevedere had been known to michelangelo and his contemporaries and disseminated in casts throughout europe from versailles to the soane museum. this is an 18th-century copy. but greece itself had remained largely unknown. artists like poussin were depicting imaginary landscapes. and then during the 18th century, the discoveries at herculaneum and pompeii, baalbek, and palmeira opened a new horizon on the ancient world. and that was the time that theorists like winckelmann and, slightly later, goethe, propounded their theory that the greek style, this noble simplicity, was the true style, was the perfec