The Sculpture Museum - Catalog - Page 41
century. Given greatest prominence in Giovanni Paolo Panini’s gallery of ancient
art (fig. 2), the Dying Gaul inspired numerous works, such as Diego Velàzquez’s
Mercury and Argus (Museo del Prado, Madrid, inv. no. P001175) and Jean Louis
David’s Male Nude Study, called Patroclus (Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg).
Copying the sculpture not only became de rigueur for art students, but the Dying
Gaul also represented an unmissable stop on the Grand Tour of the educated
European elite. Lord Byron, who toured Italy between 1816 and 1823, beautifully
immortalized it in his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
I see before me the Gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand – his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his droop’d head sinks gradually low –
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,
Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now
The arena swims around him – he is gone,
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail’d
the wretch who won.
related literature
F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900,
New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 224–27
M. Leither-Jasper and P. Wengraf, European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection, exh. cat.,
The Frick Collection, New York, 2004
