On the ceiling of the Louvre’s Gallery of Apollo, there are six sets of ‘grotesques’ in which the gods of the planets mingle with colourful curves. Grotesque art was born at the hands of Raphael in Italy in the 16th century. Impressed by the mural paintings of the villas of Roman antiquity, the Renaissance painter had the idea of reproducing them in a mixture of vegetation intermingled with exuberant figures. This “cave art” became grotesque art. The painter Leonard Gonthier (1625-1701) was inspired by this artistic style for his grotesques located between the compartments of the large-format paintings.