Bronze "diana Of Versailles," Cast By Barbedienne, 19th Century

An elegant bronze figure with a brown patina depicting Diana the Huntress, shown walking alongside a young stag. The goddess, dressed in a short tunic tucked into her belt—in keeping with the classical iconography of hunting deities—rests her right hand on the quiver slung over her shoulder, while her left hand holds the stag by the antlers in a gesture of complicity and discreet dominance. The composition, characterized by understated movement, delicately renders the animated drape of the tunic and the anatomy of the leaping stag, depicted on three legs.

The bronze, featuring a beautiful brown patina with subtle nuances, rests on a rectangular base and bears the signature of the foundryman Barbedienne, a mark of casting and chiseling of the highest quality.

Dimensions: H 52 cm — base 15 x 20 cm

19th-century French school

Note: This composition is inspired by one of the most famous and most frequently copied ancient models in the history of sculpture: the Diana of Versailles, now housed in the Louvre Museum. It is a Roman marble copy, dating from the Imperial period (2nd century), of a Greek bronze original from the 4th century B.C., generally attributed to the Athenian sculptor Leochares. Rediscovered in Italy, the statue entered the French royal collections in 1556, when Pope Paul IV presented it to King Henry II—a gift whose allusion to Diane de Poitiers, the king’s mistress, did not escape anyone’s notice. The work successively adorned the Château de Fontainebleau, the Louvre, and then the Château de Versailles, which explains why it is known today by its current name.

Ferdinand Barbedienne, born in 1810, founded in 1838, in collaboration with the engineer Achille Collas, one of the most prestigious Parisian art foundries of the 19th century. Thanks to the mechanical reduction process developed by Collas, the Barbedienne foundry was able to produce, in various sizes, faithful reproductions of ancient and modern masterpieces housed in major museums, thereby making a cultural heritage previously reserved for royal collections accessible to a broad clientele drawn from the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Renowned for the excellence of its lost-wax castings and the quality of its patinas, the Barbedienne foundry remains today one of the most sought-after signatures in 19th-century bronze art.

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