Luca della Robbia (1400 – 1482):
Madonna and Child
Memorial to the Victims of Communism, Prague.
Venus Victrix by Canοva
Canova’s marble sculpture of 1804- 08 epitomizes neo-classical nude beauty, is Napoleon’s sister Pauline, Princess Borghese (1780 -1825), portrayed as Venus, reclining on an equally finely shaped sofa. Disobedient to Napoleon like all his siblings, and notorious for her promiscuity which was on a classical Roman scale of its own, she was the only one who was loyal to him in exile on Elba.
A BERNINI, with thanks to svell:
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25.
It depicts the most dramatic and dynamic moment in one of Ovid’s stories in his Metamorphoses. In the story, Apollo, the god of light, scolded Eros, the god of love, for playing with adult weapons. In retribution, Eros wounded Apollo with a golden arrow that induced him to fall madly in love at the sight of Daphne, a water nymph sworn to perpetual virginity, who, in addition, had been struck by Eros with a lead arrow which caused her to harshly spurn Apollo’s advances. The sculpture depicts the moment when Apollo finally captures Daphne, yet she has implored her father, the river god, to destroy her beauty and repel Apollo’s advances by transforming her into a laurel tree. This statue represents an elaborate conceit of sculpture. It tracks the metamorphoses as a representation in stone of a person changing into lifeless vegetation; in other words, while a sculptor’s art is to change inanimate stone into animated narrative, this sculpture narrates the opposite, the moment a woman becomes a tree. (wiki)
Bernini, Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, 1616
Roman, copy from a Greek original. Aphrodite and Eros. 2nd century.
Marble.
State Hermitage Museum. St. Petersburg, Russia.
Lord Frederic Leighton -An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (detail), 1877. Bronze
Yikes.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
India (probably Madhya Pradesh),
11th century
Sandstone
Wealth should not be seized…for if a man take great wealth violently and perforce, or if he steal it through his tongue, as often happens when gain deceives men’s sense and dishonor tramples down honor, the gods soon blot him out and make that man’s house low, and wealth attends him only for a little time. - Homer (900 BC-800 BC)
Statue of Homer at the Bavarian State Library, Munich
✩
Satan Crushed
(Note: St. Michael’s Victory over the Devil statue at St. Michaelis Church in Hamburg, Germany. St. Michaelis is one of Hamburg’s five main churches. — Shades and Shadows)
