Picasso was born old, as old was the century that saw him born. The XIX was a gluttonous century. At his end, he had devoured everything: space and time, colonial conquests, distant countries, the last frontiers. But also the most unexpected cultures, the strangest customs, the most shocking practices, the most exotic civilizations. It seemed that science, progress, techniques had to be his next and last conquests. On the one hand, Bouvard and Pécucher, and on the other, Des Esseintes. All the knowledge, even the most doubtful, all the drunkenness, even the most ignoble. What then could a hungry young painter like Picasso gobble up? Especially in contact with an academic artist, his own father, Ruiz, who was an encyclopedia of models and know-how. Well, he would have to start from scratch. Back to the origins. Surrounding the immense accumulated, sedimented, polished massif of knowledge to find the source: maybe Greece, in times of archaisms. A primitive, wild, violently colored, terrifying Greece, without the filter of classical interpretations. How to manage to withstand the direct glare of that first fire, which burns like the divinity, which cannot be looked at directly?