Another artist who worked with Baudry at the decoration of the Grand Opera House was _Élie Delaunay_, who painted in a hall leading out of the foyer three large pictures on the myths of Apollo, Orpheus, and Amphion, and was at that time less appreciated than he deserved. Delaunay was born in the same year as Baudry, and, like him, was a Breton. In their genius also they are very similar. He shared in Baudry's admiration of the masters of the Renaissance, but his worship was less for the Cinquecento than the fourteenth century. It was in Flandrin's studio that he prepared himself for his entry into the École des Beaux Arts. His first picture, in 1849, "Christ healing a Leper," was, with respect to its Roman manner of conceiving form and its bronze-like firm draughtsmanship, still entirely in the style of Ingres. It was not till he went to Italy in 1856, as winner of the Prix de Rome, that he turned from the works of the Roman school to those of the early Renaissance masters, to whom he was attracted by their rigorous study of form and their manly severity. His sketch books were filled with drawings after Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Pollajualo, Ghirlandajo, Botticelli, Gozzoli, and Signorelli. It was just at this time that French sculpture was making its significant revolt against the antique and in favour of Donatello, Verrocchio, and Della Robbia; that the Prix de Florence was founded, and that Paul Dubois' "Florentine Singer" appeared. Delaunay became as a pupil of the Quattrocento masters one of the greatest draughtsmen of the century, a healthy Naturalist in the sense in which the Primitives were so, with a concise and firm power of design which only Ingres amongst modern French painters shares with him. The bodies of his nude male figures are strained in nerve and muscle like those of Donatello; they have the essential elegance and powerful rhythm of Dubois' statues. Even the two pictures which he sent from Italy to the Salon, "The Nymph Hesperia fleeing from the Pursuit of Æsacus," and the "Lesson on the Flute" in the Museum at Nantes, were works of great taste and sincerity, studied with respectful and patient devotion to nature, without striving after sentimental effect and without conventional reminiscences. When in 1861 he returned from Rome, he completed the frescoes in the church of St. Nicholas in Nantes, which, in their strict severity, remind one of Signorelli's Cycle at Orvieto. In 1865 appeared in the Salon his "Plague at Rome," which afterwards passed into the Luxembourg, and which is not devoid of tragic accent. In that collection hangs also his "Diana" of 1872, a proud nude figure drawn with firm and manly lines, and full of grave dignity, after the manner of Feuerbach. At the same time as his "Diana" he exhibited his portrait of a Mlle. Lechat, seated like one of Botticelli's Madonnas in front of a trellis of roses--in the style of the old masters, and yet modern, naturalistic, and in excellent taste.