In 1813, the Académie de France à Rome, an institution that since 1666 had welcomed elite French artists to Rome to complete their education through immersion in the antique, faced being dismantled permanently. The state of history painting had been assessed, and ancient history—the specialty of these young academic painters in Rome—had lost out to present-day Napoleonic warfare as the subject worthiest of representation. My dissertation project, “Revolutionizing the Antique: French Artists and Artistic Community in Napoleonic Rome, 1803–1819,” investigates the solutions young painters like Ingres, Blondel, Boisselier, and Géricault invented in Rome to sustain the antique—the only art they had been trained to reproduce—as an imperative for history painting. My work casts a dynamic, shifting, uniquely Roman antique as a lens through which to view the development of French history painting during this period. It challenges traditional narratives of academic instruction and hierarchies, revealing the Roman Académie as a location of dissent and invention as opposed to a sedate training ground for an ever-rigidifying style.