The Sculpture Museum - Catalog - Page 25
fig. 2
Charles Le Brun, Portrait of the Sculptor
Nicolas Le Brun, c. 1635, oil on canvas
Salzburg, Residenzgalerie
had been triumphantly processed through the streets of Paris in July 1798, it was
returned to Rome, following the defeat of Napoleon, in January 1816 (Haskell and
Penny 1981, p. 142).
The elegant antique marble Hermes has been regarded with the utmost
reverence ever since it was discovered in the mid sixteenth century. This is
demonstrated by the trend for artists and connoisseurs to have themselves depicted
in the vicinity of the model. For example, Nicolas de Largillière’s portraits of
both Charles Le Brun (Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 5661) and Nicolas Coustou
(Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, inv. no. 80.1) feature a version of the
model. Similarly, in Charles Le Brun’s portrait of c. 1635 (fig. 2, Residenzgalerie,
Salzburg, inv. no. 254), his father, the sculptor Nicolas Le Brun, is presented with
a plaster cast of it. The reasons for this appear to have been as much pedagogic
as they were aesthetic and socio-cultural, for Bernini had made the remarkable
statement to the Paris Academy in 1666 that ‘when I was in difficulties with my
first statue, I turned to the Antinous (Hermes) as to the oracle’ (Wittkower [1958]
1999, p. 21).
