(AFP) Teachers at a school outside Paris refused to work on Monday as the establishment grappled with a crisis sparked by the showing in class of a painting by a Renaissance master containing several nude women.
Education Minister Gabriel Attal visited the Jacques-Cartier middle school in Issou, west of Paris, in person on Monday and later said the pupils concerned would be disciplined.
On Thursday, “during a French class, a colleague showed a 17th-century painting that showed naked women,” said Sophie Venetitay, secretary general of the Snes-FSU secondary school teachers’ union.
The painting, “Diana and Actaeon” by the Italian painter Giuseppe Cesari, portrays a Greek mythology story in which the hunter Actaeon bursts in at a site where the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathing.
