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The article shows how the motif of the studio glass roof deserves to be considered in relation to Romantic, Realist, Naturalist and Decadent poetics, as well as to the architectural innovations of the nineteenth century, which marked the gradual conquest of glass and iron in urban space. The analysis offers a chronological, thematic and poetic tour of fictional and real places of life and creation, from Théophile Gautier to Joris-Karl Huysmans, via Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers. At stake: the gradual opacification that marks the transformation of the artist’s studio into a writer’s studio, then into an aesthete’s studio, and the transition from a sceno-mythographic conception of the Romantic writer-artist as demiurge to that of an aesthete who collects more than he creates in his Maison d'[un] artiste.