franois girardon (1628–1715)
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The Abduction of Proserpina Bronze, rich olive patina with extensive traces of original lacquer 105 cm (41½ in.) high provenance Possibly Vaudreuil collection sale, 26 November 1787, lot 184 Whence D’Espagnac-Tricot collection Their sale, 22 May 1793, lot 192 (sold 2,350 livres to Haudiq) literature A. Maral, Girardon, le sculpteur de Louis XIV, Paris, 2015, pp. 428, 450, 511, illus. p. 449
The greatest French sculptor of his day, François Girardon was crucial to the birth of the classical style of academic sculpture that took centre stage during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and would influence generations of artists to come in France and beyond. Having completed his training in both Paris and Rome, in 1657 Girardon was formally accepted into the Académie Royale, where his morceau de réception was a marble oval medallion of The Virgin of Sorrows (now Musée du Louvre). His importance as France’s leading sculptor is evident in two highly prestigious commissions, one for the funerary monument to Cardinal de Richelieu in the Chapel of the Sorbonne, Paris (begun 1675), the other for the monumental bronze equestrian statue of the King in Roman armour (1683–92) made for the Place Louis le Grand in Paris (now Place Vendôme), destroyed during the French Revolution. Highly successful throughout his career, under royal patronage Girardon executed important sculptural groups for both the Louvre and Versailles residences, and rapidly rose through the ranks of the Académie, where he was made Chancellor in 1695. Girardon’s academic training and studies in Rome permeated his work with a deeply rooted classicism that transcended the more ornate Baroque style of his contemporaries, drawing instead parallels with ancient statuary, especially after Hellenistic models, and the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), which the young Girardon had been able to admire extensively during his stay in the papal city. A further source of inspiration for our artist was doubtlessly the Flemish master Giambologna (1529–1608), court sculptor to the Medici Grand Dukes in Florence, whose reinterpretation of classical models – similarly to Girardon’s – combined the solemn splendour of antiquity with the emotional verve and dramatic sense of space of the Italian High Renaissance. The bronze presented here is an autograph cast of one of Girardon’s most spectacular and sophisticated compositions, famously also executed in marble for the planned, yet never completed, Parterre d’Eau in the gardens at Versailles. Both an homage to two of the most celebrated masterpieces of previous generations – Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Woman in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence (finished in 1583) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s own portrayal of the Abduction of Proserpina,