Jean-Baptiste Vietty

At the Salon of 1824 he received the médaille d’or for a Homère méditant l’Iliade, His bronze version of the Medici Apollino in Florence is a fountain figure in the garden of the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon (illustration).

A professor both of the fine arts and the classical languages, in 1831 he published a historic and analytic study of the Roman and Gothic monuments of Vienne, with drawings by Étienne Rey.

A man of independent temperament, he and Edgar Quinet decided, however, to separate themselves from the other members of the expedition shortly after the team's arrival in Greece in March 1829.

Vietty, ignoring official orders to return to France in November, continued his research in the Peloponnese and Attica until the summer of 1831.

It is much to be desired that the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres confide the examination and cataloguing of his papers to a special commission, or at the least to an eminent Hellenist[2].