Art Of The Day Weekly
#416 - from 4 February 2016 to 10 February 2016
Yourcenar and Hadrian's ghost
BAVAY (département du Nord) - Millions of copies of Mémoires d’Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian) have been sold throughout the world, translated into forty languages, listed among the best sellers of the century. It is definitely the most famous book written by Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987). The Forum antique de Bavay had the good idea of investigating the long genesis of this work. As of 1913, young Marguerite admired the famous bust of the Emperor at the British Museum. In 1924, near Rome, she was dazzled by Hadrian's Villa. But it was only after her exile to the USA in 1939, the war, then the chance rediscovery of a trunk with her first manuscripts on the subject that she again took up the adventure that would be crowned with success when her book appeared in 1951. Why Bavay? Here we are very near Marguerite Yourcenar's roots, and the site, completely unknown, still maintains the remnants of one of the largest forums of the Roman world. While Hadrian, who governed from 117 to 138, probably never came through here (contrary to Tiberius), the objects gathered here present the person, his era, his universe, his travels, his politics, his love life. From the marble bust in the Louvre to the hook from Amiens (a tourist souvenir two million years old from Hadrian's wall in Scotland), the medallions of the ephebe Antinous to Marguerite Yourcenar's scrapbooks (kept in her house in Maine), the surprising power of seduction of the Antiquity works at various scales.
• Marguerite Yourcenar et l’empereur Hadrien, une réécriture de l’Antiquité (Marguerite Yourcenar and emperor Hadrian, a rewriting of Antiquity) at the Forum antique de Bavay, from 4 February to 30 August 2016.