# Talk:Émile Gilliéron

I have removed the condescending quotation from MacGillivray's book, in which he states, without evidence, that Gilliéron's motive for working at Knossos was to bask in the radiance of Evans's success ... [and] ensure his own fame and fortune. For one thing, the statement makes no sense for anyone familiar with Gilliéron's career: by 1900 he was the most successful and respected archaeological artist in Greece, with no need for Evans to "ensure his fame and fortune". More importantly, while MacGillivray may be reliable for dates and events, which he can pull from the excavation records, I'm not convinced that he is at all reliable when it comes to speculation about the motivations of Evans or his associates. His book has been criticized for its unrelenting hostility toward its subject: see, e.g., Peter Warren in the English Historical Review, who observes that MacGillivray "takes every opportunity to assign or impute the worst, meanest or crudest motives to Evans's actions", and cites numerous passages in which he adopts a "chiding and patronizing" tone when describing Evan's character. The same disdain is extended to those who collaborated with Evans, including, in this sentence, Gilliéron. Because of this (and because of his inaccuracy in other respects -- he even gets Gilliéron's name wrong), I don't think it's wise to repeat his uncharitable opinion in the WP article unless it is confirmed by some other source. Choliamb (talk) 19:04, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

In light of the above, I've gone ahead and removed another one of MacGillivray's comments about "Evans's need for an earthly authority at Knossos", which seems unnecessary here, and is even more snarky and patronizing in its original context. Choliamb (talk) 19:14, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
In general, the point is well taken, though I think we need to be a little careful here. Neutrality (by Wikipedia's standards) emphatically does not mean that we only use sources that are themselves neutral, or discount non-neutral or partisan sources (as long as those sources are themselves respectable works of scholarship) but that we report even-handedly on the different views put forward in the sources. I think your removal of the speculation about G. wanting to ensure his own reputation is sound -- here, there's an independent reason to think that M.'s suggestion, frankly, isn't worth much.
However, we might perhaps have thrown two babies out with the bathwater -- the first being that G. cancelled all his other work to take the position with Evans, and the second being the speculation about the reconstruction of the "Priest-King" was motivated in part by Evans' desire for Knossos to have a king. It's fairly well documented that Evans put the cart of his ideas of Minoan society before the horse of his reconstructions at Knossos (see e.g. this page from Oxford: the famous example being his naming of the "Grand Staircase" after the one at Windsor Castle), and so I think it's at least a plausible conjecture that M. makes here -- and indeed, as I remember, we previously reported it as nothing more than a conjecture. UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:21, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Hi there. I don't disagree with your final sentence, but in this context I'm not particularly concerned about what Evans thought, since this article is about Gilliéron, and specifically about Gilliéron père. Because it's obviously relevant to the work that he and his son did at Knossos, I think it's fine to note that questions have been raised about the reconstructions of many of the frescoes, but I don't see this as the place to go into detail about Evans and his beliefs about Minoan society. There's a whole article on Arthur Evans for that. As for MacGillivray, if he were the only source critical of Evans, things would be different. But as you point out, there is plenty of other scholarship questioning Evans's approach to the reconstructions at Knossos, so the requirements of WP:DUEWEIGHT can be easily satisfied by quoting the more measured criticisms of more responsible scholars instead. In the case of the Priest-King specifically, the WP article already does this: the work of Coulomb and Niemeier and Shaw is mentioned in the same paragraph, and I have no problem with any of them. Shaw, who is cited, provides a good summary of earlier scholarship on the question, and she even notes in passing the effect of Evans's ideas about priest-kings, so as far as I can see MacGillivray adds nothing of value here. I'm not trying to defend Evans, about whom I have no feelings one way or another, but I don't see why you want to defend MacGillivray when there are so many other scholars who have made the same points without the sarcasm and axe-grinding. Anyway, that's my opinion, which you can accept or reject. If you want to reintroduce one or both quotes into the article, I still think it's a bad idea, but I'm not going to fight about it. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 19:32, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I must admit I haven't done the digging yet -- if we have a theory for why the Priest-King looks the way it does (especially in the light of increasingly overwhelming evidence that it shouldn't look like that), that's relevant to an article on Gilliéron, who actually did the restoration (even if he was influenced in doing so by Evans). I don't particularly want to defend MacGillivray, to be honest: if we've got a better source that says the same thing, it would seem a straightforward improvement to swap that one in. I do think the detail about cancelling all work is fine as a MacGillivray citation (as you note in your first comment, there's no reason to doubt M's statements of fact en masse) -- what do you think there? UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:41, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
I don't want to get involved in a long back-and-forth here, and because Gilliéron's work at Knossos is not what interests me about him, I don't want to spend my time looking through the contemporary scholarship on the reconstructions at Knossos and trying to improve that part of the article. My purpose in opening this section of the talk page was just to explain that I had seen a bullshit quotation from MacGillivray and removed it, and why. Beyond that, I'm happy to let you do what you please with the Cretan stuff. But since you ask directly about "cancelling all work", I have to say no, I object to that statement too, partly because it is untrue, and partly because it misrepresents the source (= MacGillivray , p. 187). Before I removed the sentence, the article said Gilliéron and his son Émile, born in 1885 and generally known as Gilliéron fils, would work for Evans at Knossos for the next three decades. Gilliéron cancelled all of his other commitments to work at Knossos. The juxtaposition of these two statements seems to imply that Gilliéron canceled all of his other projects in order to devote himself exclusively to Knossos for the next three decades (or, in his case, the two decades and change that remained before his death). That is obviously nonsense, since we know that he did no such thing, and it is not what MacGillivray says. What he says is that after visiting the site around Easter in 1900, Gilliéron was intrigued by the finds and accepted Evans's offer of work. At that point "he traveled to Athens briefly to cancel other arrangements, and then returned to Crete, where he joined the team for an extended stay". Whatever is meant by "an extended stay" (weeks? months?), it is clear from the context that MacGillivray is talking specifically about the spring of 1900, and that the "arrangements" that G. cancelled were the obligations that would have prevented him from returning to Crete to start work immediately, not a renunciation of "all other commitments"  or "all other work" for the duration of the excavations at Knossos. The word "all", which does not appear in the source, but does appear in the sentence I removed from the WP article (and in your comment above), helps to transform a specific comment about G.'s actions in the spring of 1900 into a general statement that implies a complete change in the course of his career. The fact that many contemporary scholars have focused exclusively on G.'s Cretan work does not mean that G. did the same. If you think it's important to mention the sequence of events in 1900 and you want to cite MacGillivray, I have no objection, as long as it is clearly placed in the context of the first season of G.'s work at Knossos, and not inflated to seem more significant than it is.
Finally, re your comment above: that's relevant to an article on Gilliéron, who actually did the restoration. Did he? My understanding is that the Priest-King as we see it today was restored by Gilliéron fils. I haven't read Coulomb and Niemeier (or Gere for that matter), but I did just go back and check Shaw to confirm that I wasn't misremembering, and she says the same thing. I wasn't going to raise this question at all, because given the nature of the family business and the way the work was carried out at Knossos, it may be difficult or impossible to sort out who actually held the brush or arranged the fragments in many instances, and there's no point in fretting too much about it until someone with access to the Knossos excavation archive and the Gilliéron archive at the EFA publishes a reliable list of who did what when (if such a thing is even possible). To be clear, I am not claiming that G. père had no role in the restoration of the Priest-King; he was presumably deeply involved in the early discussions of the fragments with Evans, and perhaps in the final arrangement as well. For modern scholars studying the creation of a "Minoan" decorative program at Knossos, this is not a hair worth splitting. But in a biographical article about one particular artist, the distinction is more important, and since this article is nominally about G. senior, it wouldn't be out of place to indicate more clearly that the criticisms of the Priest-King fresco are criticisms of an artifact produced, in its final form, by his son. I don't think this undermines the point you make above, by the way; if anything, the fact that we can't precisely allot the responsibility for the appearance of the fresco among the three people involved strengthens your argument that Evans's motivation is relevant here. I still think most of that discussion belongs in the Evans article, not this one, but I have no objection if you want to put it back here. My only suggestion is that you paraphrase rather than quoting MacGillivray directly, since "to satisfy Evans's need for an earthly ruler at Knossos" seems to me unnecessarily patronizing. For comparison, Frazer's ideas about dying vegetation gods are also out of fashion, but we don't dismiss them as a sign of his "need" for annual regicide, as if it were some irrational compulsion. Readers who want that kind of cheap psychologizing can turn to MacGillivray's book; there's no need for WP to amplify it.
That's it for me on this topic. I'll be away for the next week or so, but as I work my way through the Olympisme catalogue I may do a little more work (probably not a lot) on the parts of the article that deal with other aspects of G.'s career, which I personally find more interesting than his Cretan adventures. Now that I've made my point about MacGillivray, I won't be touching the Knossos sections, so feel free to handle those as you see fit. You've certainly read more of the recent literature on Evans and the fresco reconstructions than I have, and except in the few instances mentioned above I have no desire to substitute my judgment for yours.  Choliamb (talk) 15:12, 16 August 2024 (UTC)
Thank you -- as ever, detailed, knowledgeable and well expressed. Honestly, the problem of which Gilliéron we're talking about is endemic in the sources (not helped by the fact that not all writers seem to realise that there were two of them), and I've generally taken the view that you can't separate them as long as Gilliéron senior is alive. Will have a good look through and make the edits as necessary. UndercoverClassicist T·C 15:24, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

It's clear that the Gilliéron family archive recently donated to the French School in Athens (see Mitsopoulou and Polychronopoulou 2019) is going to provide an enormous amount of new information about Gilliéron père et fils. The material is still being organized and catalogued, but some of the results of the first sifting have already been published, mostly by Christina Mitsopoulou, who appears to be the scholar charged with overseeing the collection. Two recent works in particular are full of previously unpublished material:  

Mitsopoulou, Christina (2021). "Der Künstler Émile Gilliéron und seine Werke: Zur Vermittlung archäologischer Forschungsergebnisse an den Beispielen der Aquarellkopien aus Pompeji, Herculaneum, und Demetrias". In Lehmann, Stephan (ed.). Die Aquarellkopien antiker Wand- und Marmorbilder im Archäologischen Museum von Émile Gilliéron u. a. Kataloge und Schriften des archäologischen Museums der Martin-Luther-Universität. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag. pp. 33–65. ISBN 9783954986187.
Mitsopoulou, Christina; Farnoux, Alexandre; Jeammet, Violaine, eds. (2024). L'Olympisme: Une invention moderne, un héritage antique. Paris: Hazan. ISBN 9782754113830.
Both of them are especially valuable for the light they cast on otherwise neglected aspects of Gilliéron's career: the first on his watercolors of Roman wall paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the second on his close association with the modern Olympic games in Athens. The Olympisme exhibition at the Louvre and the accompanying catalogue in particular draw heavily on the Gilliéron archive to illustrate his role in the promotion of the Athenian games (both the 1896 Olympics and the intercalated "Mesolympics" in 1906) and in the creation of an Olympic iconography inspired by ancient Greek sculpture and vase painting. It would be nice to see some of this material included in the WP article, which is currently heavily tilted toward his work on Minoan and Mycenaean antiquities. That tilt is understandable, since most modern scholarship has focused on this aspect of his work, and even his contemporaries agreed that this was the field with which he was, by the end of his life, most closely associated. But it's still only one facet of a long and multifaceted career, and I'd like to see the article gave a little more space to his many other activities.
In the meantime, I've added these two works to the article's bibliography and used them to expand and correct the description of his early life and education. Choliamb (talk) 12:54, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

In 1889, Gilliéron's watercolours of recent discoveries from the Acropolis, including parts of the sculptures of Heracles and the Hydra, which once formed a pediment of the temple known as the Hekatompedon, were exhibited in Paris as part of the Greek pavilion for the Exposition Universelle. There is a confusion of two different buildings here. The large poros group attributed to the Hekatompedon pediment (Mertens figs. 6 & 12) shows Herakles wrestling with a scaly-tailed marine creature, conventionally identified as Triton. The Hydra pediment (Mertens figs. 8 & 14), which is much smaller and executed in low relief, belongs to a different, smaller structure, perhaps analogous to the treasuries at Olympia and Delphi. Mertens does not specify which watercolors were displayed at the Paris exposition of 1889; do you have a source confirming that either Herakles and Triton or Herakles and the Hydra were among them? Mertens cites an essay in the catalogue for the first Bunte Götter exhibition, which I don't have access to. If you don't have another source, perhaps best not to be too specific here. I have removed and rephrased. Choliamb (talk) 12:58, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Oh dear -- good catch. I don't, unfortunately, and Mertens is very vague indeed, so agree that similar vagueness is a good approach here. Also fixed the same error at Panagiotis Kavvadias. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:14, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
I hadn't read your article on Kavvadias before, but prompted by your reply here I took a quick look, and in the section describing the Acropolis excavations of the 1880s I noticed another small confusion regarding the nomenclature of the Archaic temples on the Acropolis. As you have already seen, I changed it, and left a very long explanation for a very small edit. I didn't read through the whole article carefully, but during my quick skim I noticed a few other small things that I think might also benefit from correction or clarification. With one or two exceptions, I probably won't try to address these any time soon, since I don't have a lot of time in real life right now, and I'd rather spend my very limited WP time on Gilliéron. (I plan to upload his watercolors of the painted funerary stelai from Demetrias to the Commons tomorrow.) Nothing in the Kavvadias article seems urgent; just my usual carping and nitpicking over small details. It goes without saying (but I will say it anyway) that it's a very good article overall. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 23:34, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for those and your kind words -- I've seen your notes (which seems an inadequate word -- free classics lessons!) on the Talk page, and will work my way through them. If you happen to know of a good image for Balanos's work, would be gratefully received (otherwise, will scour Commons etc). UndercoverClassicist T·C 05:51, 2 September 2024 (UTC)
I have seen photographs of the damage caused by the iron pieces used in Balanos's restorations (there's one in Mallouchou-Tufano's chapter in the CCAM volume, p. 82, for example), but most of them have been taken comparatively recently, during the latest round of restorations, so they won't be in the public domain. Perhaps you could use a more general 19th-century view of the Parthenon under scaffolding, like File:Parthénon - Angle nord-ouest, échafaudé - Athènes - Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine - APMH00025645.jpg or File:Parthénon - Angle nord-ouest, échafaudé - Athènes - Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine - APMH00025644.jpg? These are in the category "Parthenon in 1898" in the Commons, although on what evidence I do not know; the source of the images (French Ministry of Culture) dates them to 1894–1895. But perhaps that's close enough, if you caption it something like "The Parthenon after the earthquake of 1894" rather than "The Parthenon during Balanos's restoration". Choliamb (talk) 12:13, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

@UndercoverClassicist: I've added a new section on G.'s work in connection with the games of 1896 and 1906, based on the essays in the catalogue of the Olympisme exhibition at the Louvre. Your advice about not overloading the article with level-2 headings is well taken, but this seemed to require one, since it doesn't fit comfortably into the existing sections. I've placed it between the section on his early career (mostly before 1900) and that on Knossos and his later career (mostly after 1900), where it seems to fit nicely. As always, feel free to edit as much as you like for style or clarity, or if you think I've included unnecessary detail. (Does it really matter where the stamps were printed, for example?) 
What do you think about the images, which place G's designs next to the ancient works that inspired them? I tried to mix them up (one stamp, one plaster relief, juxtaposed with one coin and one vase painting) to show the range of the works involved and avoid duplication. There are plenty of other examples that could be used, but these are visually attractive and they read well at small sizes. 
<incidental rant> To me, as someone who often finds WP conventions perverse and counterproductive, it seems obvious that readers would benefit if the text of the article were allowed to contain wikilinks pointing directly to images at the Commons, so that a single click would take them to, e.g., a photo of the red-figure krater with Heracles and Antaeus and the stamp that it inspired, or to the replica of the cup from Grave Circle A proposed as a trophy, or the cover of the 1896 program of events and official report, all without clogging up the text itself with too many images. Such links are accepted in talk page discussions and other places outside of article space, but they seem to be frowned on in articles, presumably because they are considered external links — although since they point to the Commons and use wikilink syntax they are not really "external" in the same way that links to, say, the BBC or the NYT are. What is the benefit to readers of having access to millions of Commons images while forbidding direct links to them except when the image itself is actually reproduced in the article? Articles should not be overloaded with illustrations, but if additional illustrations for specific objects mentioned in the article are in fact available, why shouldn't readers be pointed directly to them, with something more helpful than a  generic "Wikimedia Commons has media related to Emile Gillieron" template? It just seems goofy to me. (Not that I hold you responsible.) </incidental rant> — Choliamb (talk) 13:14, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

I think it's excellent -- both the layout and the double images are spot on, in my view. We do often have links to Wiktionary for obscure terms (and the practice is commonly recommended at FAC), so I'd probably defend a link to Commons as fundamentally the same idea. At any rate, we can always fall back on the ultimate meta-rule: I wouldn't expect this to be an issue unless/until the article is at FAC, and we can have the discussion then if need be. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:35, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. Heartened by your reply, I went back to the article with the intention of adding Commons links for the images mentioned above, only to find that the phrase "Athenian red-figure krater depicting the legendary wrestling match between Heracles and Antaeus" already has four different wikilinks to other articles, leaving no way to fit in an additional link to the Commons. And I see that WP:MOSSIS specifically names Wiktionary and Wikisource as exceptions to the rule forbidding inline links, but not Commons. Oh well, readers who care enough will find their way. It's the internet, how hard can it be? Choliamb (talk) 23:47, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

@UndercoverClassicist: You may remember that last year, when I uploaded the photos of the painted casts of Acropolis korai now in the cast museum in Munich, we had a disagreement on your talk page over the date. You wanted to date them to the late 19th century on the basis of this page at the cast museum web site; I countered that the museum in Munich has no information about the date of these casts independent of the records of their original acquisition in the archive of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and that the evidence presented by Mertens and Conte 2019, who were working in the Met's archive, pointed instead to a date in the first decades of the 20th century. We let the matter drop then, but I was prompted to revisit it when I ran across two additional pieces of information: the korai are conspicuously absent from the catalogue of casts in the Met collection published in 1908, and Gisela Richter (who actually purchased the casts and was in a position to know) writes in The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (1950 ed., p. 150, note 102) that they were painted by Gilliéron fils on the basis of watercolors made by his father. The son was born in 1885, so if it was he who painted them, they can hardly date to the 19th century; and although negative evidence is not entirely conclusive, their absence from the catalogue of casts (which is not a selection but a comprehensive listing of over 2500 pieces) strongly suggests that they were acquired after 1908. So decided to search the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum after 1908 to see if I could find any announcement of their acquisition. 
I first found this notice in the Bulletin of November 1912, which records the purchase of a colored cast of kore 680. The notice makes it clear that this was the first cast of an Acropolis kore that the museum had managed to acquire: Richter writes "they could hitherto be studied only from photographs, or in Athens itself, where the originals are; for, on account of the extensive traces of color preserved on the statues, it was thought advisable not to have them cast." But an exception had been made for an exhibition in Rome in 1911, for which ten casts were created, and the Met was able to secure one of these, which they then handed over to Gilliéron (père or fils not specified) for painting. Kore 680 was not one of the ones that I photographed in Munich, and it is inconceivable that Richter would have written this way if the Met already possessed at least four other painted casts of korai, so the others must have been acquired after 1912, and I kept looking. It took a while, but I finally found them, in the Bulletin of July 1924, in a notice by Richter entitled "An Exhibition of Greek Casts". There the four korai that I photographed in Munich (674, 675, 679, and 686) are included in a list of casts "lately bought" by the Met and exhibited in the "Room of Recent Accessions", and Richter again states that they were painted by Gilliéron fils after sketches made by his father shortly after their discovery. 
So I take it as proven now that these casts were acquired in 1924 or not long before. I have changed the information on the image pages at the Commons, and in the captions of the illustrations in the Gilliéron WP article. Since we now know that the painting of the casts was the work of the son, even if based on the drawings of the father, I'm not sure we need three images of them in the article. I've retained kore 674 (the most attractive and polychromatic example) and removed the others, but feel free to change that if you think differently. Choliamb (talk) 13:37, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

All sounds very sensible. One of these days, I'll get to writing the article on Gilliéron fils, and I'll trawl through the page history to pull them out! UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:49, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Is currently uncited. Has it actually been used, or should it be moved to Further Reading (or just binned?) UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:43, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Looks like I originally cited it to document Hantz's participation in the making of the Vapheio cups, but replaced it when I found that Mitsopoulou discussed this in greater detail (see this edit). I've removed it from the list of refs, since there's no longer any need for it, and it's not substantial enough to deserve a place in Further Reading. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 17:06, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I don't understand the brackets on this one -- are they the same place? The eponymous articles, such as they count for anything, seem to suggest not. UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:14, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Demetrias was founded by Demetrios Poliorketes in the early 3rd century BC, by a forced act of synokism that absorbed all of the earlier villages around the northern end of the Pagasitic Gulf. Of those villages Pagasai was by far the most important; it controlled the port at the head of the gulf, which is why the gulf is named after it, and why it was taken by Philip II in the 4th century. The other villages are mostly ciphers that appear only as names in Strabo or later inscriptions. Many of the new "planned cities" of the Hellenistic period (e.g., Priene, Herakleia under Latmos) were laid out on sites a few kilometers from their original locations. Politically, historically, and geographically, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that Hellenistic Demetrias was the successor of Classical Pagasai, even if it did not occupy precisely the same spot.
We know where Hellenistic Demetrias was: it was on the coast a couple of kilometers south of modern Volos, where the remains of the city, including its Hellenistic fortifications, are still visible. The center of population of Classical Pagasai must have been somewhere along the same stretch of coastline, in an arc from Volos in the north to the promontory of Soros in the south, a distance of about 6–8 km. Some people think it was on the site of Demetrias, where there is a second set of (older?) fortifications south of the Hellenistic walls, and Classical graves in the cemetery north of the Hellenistic city. Others think it was a couple of kilometers further down the coast, and still others think it was on the Soros promontory, which forms the southeastern point of the bay of Volos. There are remains of ancient habitation earlier than the 3rd century in both of those places, but as far as I know there is no evidence that would allow us to place Classical Pagasai at any one of these spots with certainty. I suspect I wrote it this way because that's what Arvanitopoulos did in his publication of the stelai (Arvanitopoulos 1928), but if you think it's better to remove the name Pagasai here, I have no objection. It's irrelevant in this context anyway, since the painted stelai copied by Gilliéron all date to the period of the Hellenistic city, not earlier.
— Choliamb (talk) 00:38, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
I've axed it for now: personally, even if we did write "the successor of classical Pagasai", I think it would be a bit tangential (a little like saying "Stanley Casson was part of the army occupying Constantinople, the successor of classical Byzantium"). As you know well, there's a couple of these multiple toponyms (Berbati/Prosymna is my particular bugbear) that can be real minefields when coming into a subject unaware. Not a particularly strong objection, though: I'm sure there's a way it could be reworked if felt of value. UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:20, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

The article uses DMY in the sentence: 

Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron was born on 24 October 1850 in Villeneuve, Switzerland,...
but MDY in the infobox. 
I have also added a British English template to the mainspace on the basis of finding British spellings in multiple places: “draughtsman” (not “draftsman”), “artefacts” (not “artifacts”), “civilisation” (not “civilization”). 
Could the date format be made consistent? Thank you. MSincccc (talk) 07:54, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

For reference, this is how to do it. UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:06, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
Thank you for clarifying my doubt. MSincccc (talk) 08:26, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi UndercoverClassicist, just FYI, the same photo that's used in the infobox under fair use is on commons File:Gillieron-Emile-Josephine-Zoecchi.jpg. I'm not an expert on copyright, but the 1915 photo is probably old enough to be in PD... Artem.G (talk) 10:15, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

Hm -- publication is key, not creation. This page, which is the source, says it was taken in 1915 but still under the family's copyright (which itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense). It's anonymous, which means that it's only PD in the US if taken before 1905, assuming it's unpublished (or at least wasn't until 2003). Quite a lot of publications use it, but that's not quite the same thing, since only the rights holder can "publish" it for copyright purposes. UndercoverClassicist T·C 11:00, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
The license on the Commons page is almost certainly wrong, since this is a private photo from the Gilliéron family collection, and as far as I know it was never published until sometime within the last decade or so. The earliest publication I'm aware of is in Mitsopoulou 2021b (unless the EFA website for the Gilliéron archive is earlier, but in any case not earlier than 2018). UC, have you seen it published anywhere before that? The copyright for anonymous works in the EU is normally 70 years after publication, but that applies only if publication occurs within 70 years of creation, which I think is not the case here. However (and this is the sticking point), some EU countries grant an additional publication copyright for the first publication of previously unpublished anonymous public domain works. In both France and Germany this is 25 years ("If an anonymous work was not published within 70 years after its creation, its owner who publishes it for the first time is granted an exclusive right for a duration of 25 years from the beginning of the year after the year of its publication": see here for France and here for Germany). So if Mitsopoulou 2021b (published in Dresden) or the EFA website (published in France) was indeed the first publication, the 25-year publication copyright would extend into the 2040s. That, I think, is the reason for the copyright notice on the EFA website. If the photo is anonymous, then unless there was an earlier publication before 1955, I don't think it is PD in the EU, and it should probably be removed from the Commons. (Obviously, if we knew who the photographer was, and they died before 1955, it would be a different matter, but we don't know that, and it's probably unknowable.) In any case, for the WP article it's definitely best to continue as you have done, using it only under Fair Use. Choliamb (talk) 12:28, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
I haven't seen it in any earlier works, as I recall, but will keep an eye out. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:25, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

Could the following portion: His mother died five years after he was born, and two of his brothers also died early: his younger brother Gustave in 1866 while still a teenager, and his elder brother, the classicist Alfred Gilliéron, of typhus in Macedonia in 1878.[89] His youngest brother, Jules Gilliéron, became a linguist at the École pratique des hautes études and co-authored the Atlas linguistique de la France.[90] be moved from the Personal life and death section to immediately after this sentence under Early life and education: His father, a language professor in the Progymnasium in La Neuveville near Bern, and later in the Gymnasium for girls in Basel, was also a respected amateur geologist and paleontologist.[4]
Would it make sense there, as it relates to his early family life? I’d be interested to hear what others think. MSincccc (talk) 11:38, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

Choliamb, UndercoverClassicist  just checking if you had any thoughts on this when you have a moment? Thank you. MSincccc (talk) 16:06, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
I understand the suggestion, but moving it to where you suggest creates other difficulties: in particular, although the death of his mother and brother Gustave would now be in the correct chronological position, it would put the notice of the death of his brother Julius in 1878 before the description in the following paragraph of their trip to Greece together in 1876. And Jules's career as a linguist was much later. But it's not a big deal either way. I'm not sure that this is a problem that needs solving, but I don't feel strongly about it and I have no objection if others want to change it. Choliamb (talk) 16:26, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
How about integrating the Personal life and death section into the Early life and education one and renaming the latter? MSincccc (talk) 17:12, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
My thinking there would be the same as Choliamb's above -- clearly, I'm not a detached party here, but I don't see a problem that needs solving here. On the other hand, putting someone's death into his early life clearly isn't ideal, so we'd have to slightly re-work the whole thing (that's largely based on his career) to deal with his personal life alongside it. That, in turn, would create other question-marks as to what should be included and how it should be treated. I'm not sure I see how the proposed change would make the article better. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:53, 6 September 2025 (UTC)