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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Sculptures / 19th C. Neoclassical Brass Statue of Nude Woman
Europe, Neoclassical Revival. A slender female nude caught mid-step, cast in brass and poised on the ball of one bare foot atop a domed circular plinth. Her left arm sweeps overhead, fingers closed around a small rectangular object, while the right hangs loose and open at her side, the torsion of shoulders against hips lending the figure its dancing momentum. The head turns sharply upward, the coiffure rendered as tight incised waves gathered close to the skull in a manner drawn from Archaic Greek and Etruscan prototypes. Modeling is deliberately spare: long tapering limbs, softly indicated breasts and navel, a face reduced to almond eyes and an archaic half-smile. The mottled green and umber surface is a patinated finish typical of Neoclassical Revival bronzework, made for the drawing room rather than the altar. The nineteenth-century revival of antiquity was rarely a literal copy. Foundries and sculptors across Italy, France, and Germany, feeding a Grand Tour market hungry for the classical past, produced figures that blended sources freely: the elongated proportions and archaizing coiffure here recall Etruscan votive bronzes of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, while the dancing contrapposto and unabashed nudity belong to a later Hellenistic vocabulary. Such deliberate hybrids allowed a collector to own the idea of the ancient world without pretending to own an excavation. The raised hand holding a small rectangular object may be intended as a tablet, a mirror, or a set of castanets, all attributes given to dancing figures in classical art, though the attribute is too abbreviated here for confident identification. Item # 204536
Estimate:$450
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorSculptures
Estimate:
$450
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