Alexander and Diogenes
Pierre Puget (1620-1694) · 1671-1689
Alexander the Great, on horseback and surrounded by his soldiers, has come to meet the philosopher Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and owned nothing. Asked what favour the king could grant him, Diogenes answered only that Alexander should step aside and stop blocking his sunlight. Puget carves the moment as a collision of two worlds: the restless entourage of the conqueror on one side, the half-naked old man gesturing from his barrel on the other. Over three metres high, the relief is so deeply cut that horses, banners and heads seem to break free from the marble slab.
Colbert, superintendent of the king's buildings, had the block delivered to Toulon in December 1670, and Puget sent his first sketches the following April. What began as a plan for a free-standing group became, by 1676, a design for a relief. The marble was moved to Marseille in 1681 and finished in 1689, but it only reached Paris in 1698, shipped by way of Le Havre. It was set up in the Louvre's Salle des Cent-Suisses in 1752 and entered the museum's collections in 1833. Puget worked far from Versailles, and his dramatic, Italian-trained style was never fully embraced at court.
Did You Know? Puget spent almost twenty years on this relief and never saw it installed in Paris.
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