Louvre offered France’s best perfumers a chance to create fragrances based on eight masterpieces from the collection.
Perfumes, candles, and postcards have been designed for Louvre’s gift shop. The referenced artworks included three sculptures — Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Lorenzo Bartolini’s ‘Nymph With A Scorpion’ — and five paintings — Georges De La Tour’s ‘Saint Joseph The Carpenter’, Jean August Dominique Ingres’s ‘The Valpinçon Bather’ and ‘Grand Odalisque’, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ‘The Lock’, and Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘Conversation In A Park’. No fragrance has been created after Mona Lisa, however, the famous painting is now available in VR in honour of Leonardo Da Vinci’s 500thanniversary.
The perfumers pictured the aromas of the famous artworks. Winged Victory of Samothrace seems to have just come out of a magical garden: her fragrance combines tuberose, jasmine, magnolia, and myrrh. Jean Christoph Herault centered the fragrance dedicated to Venus of Milo on a bright clementine note, while ‘Nymph With A Scorpion’ now smells of a mixture of heliotrope, jasmine, and musk thanks to Annick Ménardo. The tender ‘Conversation In A Park’ inspired Dorothea Pio to create a fragrance based on peppermint, bergamot, and Ottoman rose. Daniela Andrier and Domitille Michalon Bertier complemented Ingres’s paintings with some Oriental notes of incense, musk, patchouli, and lemongrass. Arguably the most complex fragrance in the collection was the perfume inspired by ‘Saint Joseph The Carpenter’. It combines verbena, cedar — a sacred tree once used to build the Jerusalem temple.
The fragrances will be available at the gift shop between July 3, 2019, and January 2020 daily, except Tuesday, from 10am till 7pm.
