Musée du Louvre

At the core of his work, a rich corpus of drawings illustrates his penchant for the comedy of the Comédie Italienne (Italian companies performing in France), with its pantomimes, acrobatics and cross-dressing figures. A costume and set designer for the Paris Opera starting in 1712, Gillot was also a sought-after decorator, notably collaborating with Claude Audran III on private interiors, and reinventing arabesque painting in the process.

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Notre-Dame's treasury, entirely reassembled after the French Revolution, is famous today for the prestigious relics it houses, particularly those of the Crown of Thorns and the Wood of the Cross, transferred from the former treasury of Sainte-Chapelle and, during the reign of Napoleon I, given new reliquaries in Notre-Dame.

The treasury is also renowned for the splendour of the masterpieces of French precious metalwork assembled there in the 19th century, especially those designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, providing extraordinary testimony to the history of Notre-Dame and of France itself.

The exhibition provides an unprecedented retrospective, exploring for the first time the history of the treasury prior to the French Revolution. Inventories, historic accounts, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, prints and other illustrated documents, along with several surviving pieces, will retrace the long story, starting in the Merovingian era, of Notre-Dame's treasury.