Lot Essay
This set of three life-size plaster casts was kept at the Château de l'Hospital (Portets, Gironde). They have been present there since at least 1793, the year they were listed in an inventory of the premises, located in the dining room (inventory drawn up on-site on September 25-27 and October 1, 1793, Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux). The residence was built between 1787 and 1789 for the King's Counsellor, Jacques de l'Hospital and these sculptures contribute to its neoclassical decor and architecture.
A testament to the enthusiasm for Antiquity, particularly ancient Greece, during the Age of Enlightenment, each sculpture is based on a well-known model. The Venus Callipyge is modelled after a 1st-century Roman copy of a Greek statue found in Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome, formerly part of the Farnese collection and now housed in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. The second Venus belongs to the Venus Pudica type, of which the sculptor Praxiteles created the original model with his Aphrodite of Cnidus in the mid-4th century BC, from which Roman copies such as the Capitoline Venus and the Medici Venus derive. Hebe, depicted draped in the antique manner holding her cup and ewer, exemplifies the integration of these ancient models by sculptors of the second half of the 18th century. A specimen of this same model is displayed in the antechamber of the apartment of the Intendant of the Garde-Meuble, Marc Antoine Thierry de Ville d'Avray, at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris.
A testament to the enthusiasm for Antiquity, particularly ancient Greece, during the Age of Enlightenment, each sculpture is based on a well-known model. The Venus Callipyge is modelled after a 1st-century Roman copy of a Greek statue found in Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome, formerly part of the Farnese collection and now housed in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. The second Venus belongs to the Venus Pudica type, of which the sculptor Praxiteles created the original model with his Aphrodite of Cnidus in the mid-4th century BC, from which Roman copies such as the Capitoline Venus and the Medici Venus derive. Hebe, depicted draped in the antique manner holding her cup and ewer, exemplifies the integration of these ancient models by sculptors of the second half of the 18th century. A specimen of this same model is displayed in the antechamber of the apartment of the Intendant of the Garde-Meuble, Marc Antoine Thierry de Ville d'Avray, at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris.