The Algardi Firedogs (French - chenets de l'Algarde) are two small bronze sculptural groups, individually entitled Jupiter holding his thunderbolt, seated on a terrestrial globe supported by three Titans and Juno, Jupiter's wife carried by the winds.
The originals were commissioned as the fronts of andirons or firedogs from the Roman sculptor Alessandro Algardi for Philip IV of Spain by Diego Velázquez in 1650 whilst he was Spanish ambassador to the Italian states, and he ordered four bronzes symbolizing the four elements of the court of Spain. [1] Though they were incomplete on his death and had to be completed by his pupils. He had only completed the first two in a planned set of four before his death and so the other two (Neptune carried by the waters and Cybele carried by the earth) were produced by his children. Philip did not use them as firedogs but as decorative elements for the garden of his Aranjuez Palace.
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Other 17th century foundries produced copies for other royal courts, especially the Juno and Jupiter. For example, a set of these two was delivered to the Palace of Versailles in 1684. Louis XIV placed them in niches in the oval salon, but Louis XV passed them to the marquis de Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du roi, who displayed them in the château de Ménars. After the marquis' death, they were moved to the Louvre in 1795, before being converted to support a pendulum clock at Napoleon's palace of château de Saint-Cloud. The two groups were then moved to the palais des Tuileries, where in 1845 they were part-gilded by Charles Christofle. The Juno is now lost, but the Jupiter is now on display in the Louvre.
Two similar Juno and Jupiter groups were also owned by the Grand Dauphin, initially displaying them in the château de Choisy then from 1695 in the château de Meudon.
Alessandro Algardi was an Italian high-Baroque sculptor active almost exclusively in Rome. In the latter decades of his life, he was, along with Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona, one of the major rivals of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in Rome. He is now most admired for his portrait busts that have great vivacity and dignity.
The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, is a national art museum in Paris, France. It is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement and home to some of the most canonical works of Western art, including the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French Kings.
The Palace of Versailles is a former royal residence commissioned by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about 19 kilometers (12 mi) west of Paris, France.
Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra, known in French as Hyacinthe Rigaud, was a Spanish-French baroque painter most famous for his portraits of Louis XIV and other members of the French nobility.
Marie de' Medici was Queen of France and Navarre as the second wife of King Henry IV. Marie served as regent of France between 1610 and 1617 during the minority of her son Louis XIII. Her mandate as regent legally expired in 1614, when her son reached the age of majority, but she refused to resign and continued as regent until she was removed by a coup in 1617.
Nicolas Coustou was a French sculptor and academic.
Guillaume Coustou the Elder was a French sculptor of the Baroque and Louis XIV style. He was a royal sculptor for Louis XIV and Louis XV and became Director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1735. He is best known for his monumental statues of horses made for the Chateau of Marly, whose replicas now stand in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
The Empire style is an early-nineteenth-century design movement in architecture, furniture, other decorative arts, and the visual arts, representing the second phase of Neoclassicism. It flourished between 1800 and 1815 during the Consulate and the First French Empire periods, although its life span lasted until the late-1820s. From France it spread into much of Europe and the United States.
An andiron or firedog, fire-dog or fire dog is a bracket support, normally one of a pair, on which logs are laid for burning in an open fireplace, so that air may circulate under the firewood, allowing better burning and less smoke. They generally consist of a tall vertical element at the front, with at least two legs. This stops the logs from rolling out into the room, and may be highly decorative. The other element is one or more low horizontal pieces stretching back into the fireplace and serving to hold the logs off the bottom of the fireplace. An andiron is sometimes called a dog or dog-iron.
Ercole Ferrata was an Italian sculptor of the Roman Baroque.
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Château de Meudon, also known as the Royal Castle of Meudon or Imperial Palace of Meudon, is a French castle in Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine. At the edge of a wooded plateau, the castle offers views of Paris and the Seine, as well as of the Chalais valley. Located between Paris and Versailles, in the heart of a hunting reserve, the castle has an ideal topography for large gardens.
"... the most beautiful place in the world, both in its layout and in its location. " - J. F. Blondel, Cours d'Architecture ..., 1773, volume 4, p. 132.
The Crouching Venus is a Hellenistic model of Venus surprised at her bath. Venus crouches with her right knee close to the ground, turns her head to the right and, in most versions, reaches her right arm over to her left shoulder to cover her breasts. To judge by the number of copies that have been excavated on Roman sites in Italy and France, this variant on Venus seems to have been popular.
Baroque sculpture is the sculpture associated with the Baroque style of the period between the early 17th and mid 18th centuries. In Baroque sculpture, groups of figures assumed new importance, and there was a dynamic movement and energy of human forms—they spiralled around an empty central vortex, or reached outwards into the surrounding space. Baroque sculpture often had multiple ideal viewing angles, and reflected a general continuation of the Renaissance move away from the relief to sculpture created in the round, and designed to be placed in the middle of a large space—elaborate fountains such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini‘s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, or those in the Gardens of Versailles were a Baroque speciality. The Baroque style was perfectly suited to sculpture, with Bernini the dominating figure of the age in works such as The Ecstasy of St Theresa (1647–1652). Much Baroque sculpture added extra-sculptural elements, for example, concealed lighting, or water fountains, or fused sculpture and architecture to create a transformative experience for the viewer. Artists saw themselves as in the classical tradition, but admired Hellenistic and later Roman sculpture, rather than that of the more "Classical" periods as they are seen today.
Augustin Blondel de Gagny was a French connoisseur of the arts and a collector whose series of Paris auction sales, which took place soon after his death were high-water marks of the history of collecting in 18th-century France. Paintings and sculptures that passed through Blondel de Gagny's collection are dispersed in many of the world's great museums. The prints from his collection are less easily traced.
Charles-Michel-Ange Challe was a painter, draftsman and French architect.
The Medici lions are a pair of marble sculptures of lions: one of which is Roman, dating to the 2nd century AD, and the other a 16th-century pendant. Both were by 1598 placed at the Villa Medici, Rome. Since 1789 they have been displayed at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. The sculptures depict standing male lions with a sphere or ball under one paw, looking to the side.
Don Pedro of Toledo Kissing Henry IV's Sword was originally a painting of 1814 in the Troubador style by the French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, showing the Spanish ambassador Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, 5th Marquis of Villafranca kissing the sword of Henry IV of France in the salle des Caryatides of the Louvre Palace. The 1814 painting is now lost. Between 1819 and 1832, Ingres painted three additional versions of the subject.
The Pardo Venus is a painting by the Venetian artist Titian, completed in 1551 and now in the Louvre Museum. It is also known as Jupiter and Antiope, since it seems to show the story of Jupiter and Antiope from Book VI of the Metamorphoses. It is Titian's largest mythological painting, and was the first major mythological painting produced by the artist for Philip II of Spain. It was long kept in the Royal Palace of El Pardo near Madrid, hence its usual name; whether Venus is actually represented is uncertain. It later belonged to the English and French royal collections.
The Louis XIV style or Louis Quatorze, also called French classicism, was the style of architecture and decorative arts intended to glorify King Louis XIV and his reign. It featured majesty, harmony and regularity. It became the official style during the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), imposed upon artists by the newly established Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and the Académie royale d'architecture. It had an important influence upon the architecture of other European monarchs, from Frederick the Great of Prussia to Peter the Great of Russia. Major architects of the period included François Mansart, Jules Hardouin Mansart, Robert de Cotte, Pierre Le Muet, Claude Perrault, and Louis Le Vau. Major monuments included the Palace of Versailles, the Grand Trianon at Versailles, and the Church of Les Invalides (1675–1691).
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