Abstract
According to a purely Greek etymology, "Eurôpè" (ευρωπη) derives from two Greek words: eurýs and ṓps. The first, eurýs, means either broad, stretching out wide, or vast, extending far; the second, in ancient Greek ṓps, means either to look into the face, or eye. Eurôpè, "[she who has] large eyes", became a feminine first name given to several Greek mythological characters, and notably to Agénor's famous daughter kidnapped by Zeus disguised as a bull.
This etymology, which is not the only one possible, has undoubted symbolic value. It raises questions about the place of the gaze, the image and even art in the constitution of European identity and difference. A burning issue today, this question is not new. The earliest art historians worked in successive layers. Thus, for Giorgio Vasari, art was reborn after centuries of subterranean survival in Italy, or to be more precise in Tuscany, or to be even more precise in Florence. The quest for a center haunted minds right up to the Age of Enlightenment, resulting in the utopia of the " Museum ", of which the Louvre is the direct heir. The "Mnemosyne" Atlas imagined much later by Aby Warburg, on the other hand, proposed the virtuality of a network of images ideally interlinked as far as the eye could see.
