Sculpture In White Marble, Amalthea And The Jupiter's Goat, XIXth

Amalthea and the goat of Jupiter, this great group of Carrara marble of Neoclassical period is a nineteenth copy of the statue of Pierre Julien (1731-1804), commissioned in 1785, It was completed in 1787 and presented in the dairy Queen Marie Antoinette at Rambouillet. It decorated the interior of a cave built in a pavilion decorated with bas-reliefs made by the same sculptor. The original was seized during the Revolution, then exhibited in the Louvre from 1829. This same museum also preserves the sculptor's terracotta sketch. In Greek mythology, and originally in Cretan mythology, Amaltheus is the foster mother of Zeus. It is sometimes represented in the form of a goat who nurses the child god in a grotto of Crete, sometimes, and most frequently, in the guise of a nymph who gives him to drink the milk of a goat. The goat having broken a horn, Zeus offered it to Amalthea, promising that this horn would miraculously fill with flowers and fruit: it is the cornucopia. The skin of this same goat later provides the armor of Zeus, the aegis. The god placed Amalthea and the animal among the stars.