Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier

He was particularly marked by frequent meetings with Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, author of Voyage d'Anarcharsis, whom he met at the home of his cousin the duc de Choiseul.

With painters and architects in tow, Choiseul-Gouffier thus visited the south Peloponnese, the Cyclades and other Aegean islands, then moved on to Asia Minor.

On his return he published the first volume of his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, which was a great success and facilitated his intellectual and political career.

His marble bust of Marcus Aurelius, found by the French consul Louis Fauvel in Attica in 1789, was sold in 1818; it was later acquired by the Musée du Louvre, whilst an Apollo previously owned by him is now in the British Museum.

He published the second volume of his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce in 1809 and built himself a house imitating the Erechtheion.

It presented many little known monuments, set in an idealised Greece crushed by Ottoman domination and desiring to rediscover and reawaken its liberty.