The National Assembly library reopens after restoring Delacroix's ceiling
After a year-long restoration, the Palais Bourbon library reopened on 9 April 2025 — the day before the Digital Delacroix partnership was signed. A filmed tour documents the restoration of the ceiling Delacroix painted between 1838 and 1847, the very decor at the heart of the project.
The library of the French National Assembly reopened on 9 April 2025 after a year-long restoration. Two teams worked in parallel — one at floor level, the other on scaffolding suspended above the cornice — bringing together around thirty restorers working closest to the ceiling and paintings, before the library’s 55,000 volumes were put back in place.
The restored decor is the one Delacroix completed between 1838 and 1847 for the Salon du Roi and the library of the Chamber of Deputies: in the south hemicycle, the composition depicts Orpheus bringing the benefits of civilization to a still-savage Greek people. This is precisely the ceiling the Digital Delacroix project — whose partnership with the National Assembly was signed on 8 April 2025, the day before the reopening — sets out to study through high-resolution imaging, physico-chemical analysis and artificial intelligence.
A private tour of the restoration site, filmed ahead of the reopening, was published in June 2025 by the independent channel Scribe Accroupi. This third-party report offers a closer look at the restored decor and the restoration teams’ work, alongside the study now under way on that same ceiling.