Puvis spent five years creating murals for the capital that depicted the life of the patron saint of Paris. The murals were bordered with leafy garlands that added a decorative touch. Near the ceiling of the Pantheon, a riot of decorative elements including a frieze of twenty-two haloed figures and a winged monster, hung above the mural. Unlike Renaissance painting, which used one-point perspective to lead the eye into fictive space, Puvis used vertical elements that seemed to hold up the wall, with figures standing like columns. This approach excited a generation of avant-garde artists, including Picasso, who immediately copied the whole mural after arriving in Paris in 1900. The elongated figures of Picasso's blue period show reverberations of Puvis's work.

These scenes were commissioned three years after the Franco-Prussian War and the French Commune, which caused destruction from 1870-71. Installed in the Pantheon, a former church turned civic building, these murals were an instant critical success that led to future commissions. Classicism, which had fallen out of favor after Napoleon, re-entered the vocabulary of politics. Puvis's statuesque, draped figures celebrated the return of Classicism and the story of the founding of Paris. In the center panel of the triptych, a young Geneviève stood as a symbol of new beginnings in the present and the past. Saint-Germain d'Auxerre noticed that she was bearing the divine seal, as Saint Loup de Troyes arrived in Nanterre with her. The fanciful decorative elements and clarity of form in this geometrically balanced work, coupled with its idealized references to the past, made it an instant success with officials and the public. Puvis's later works expanded on this classicizing imagery, radically simplifying it and expanding its associations to embrace universal symbolism.