The Sculpture Museum - Catalog - Page 87
introduce a weight-bearing support for the Faun’s figure. The size of Chinard’s
version is closely comparable to the ancient archetype, which is now exhibited
at the Museo del Prado, Madrid (fig. 1). Chinard has managed to convey the
wonderful proportions of the original, capturing the male form in a magnificent,
idealized state, as the Faun strides forward in an elegant, classical manner. The
ancient example is considered to be a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original
belonging to the second school of Pergamon (160–150 bc). The subject depicts
the mythological creature known as a faun, or satyr, whose half-animal nature is
indicated by his pointed ears, horns and the tail on his back. The figure holds a
young goat on his shoulders, possibly as part of a Bacchanalian festival in honour
of the god Dionysus. The work was discovered in Rome around 1675 and restored
shortly afterwards by Ercole Ferrata (1610–1686).
As a much-revered example of ancient classical sculpture, versions of the Faun
and Kid have been included in the most prestigious decorative schemes of private
residences, artistic institutions and academies of Western Europe. Therefore,
Chinard could have encountered these and made his own version, without
necessarily studying the original at King Philip V’s San Ildefonso Palace, where it
would have been throughout his lifetime. For example, Anselme Flamen (1647–
1717) had made a copy for Versailles c. 1685 and Pierre Le Pautre (1659–1744) had
executed a version for Marly in 1685, whilst the French Academy in Rome had a
plaster cast of it, which Chinard could have seen after his arrival in the city in 1784.
In Rome, like many ambitious young artists, he made copies of the most famous
antiquities in order to learn the secrets of the ancients.
related literature
F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900, New Haven
and London, 1981, pp. 211–12
