Nymph of Fontainebleau
Benvenuto Cellini, with Pierre Bontemps (Cellini 1500-1571; Bontemps c. 1505-1568) · 1542-1543
A reclining nymph fills a wide bronze lunette, her body stretched almost four metres across the field, one arm resting on the neck of a large stag whose antlers spread behind her like a crown. Hounds, a boar and other game crowd the corners, and the whole is framed by an oval of running water and foliage. She personifies the spring at Fontainebleau and the hunting forest around it, the two things the royal residence existed for. The stag alludes directly to the name of the place and to the king's own emblem.
The relief is a single great bronze casting, a feat of foundry work that Cellini regarded as proof of his superiority over French rivals, and the modelling is deliberately mannerist: the limbs are lengthened far beyond nature, the head is small, the torso is drawn into a long shallow arc. Look at how the surface changes depth. The nymph's body swells into nearly full round at the hip and shoulder, then flattens into the barest incision for the distant animals, so the eye reads recession without any real perspective. Pierre Bontemps worked on the surrounding frame and the finishing of the cast.
François I ordered it for the Porte Dorée, the ceremonial entrance to the château of Fontainebleau, but the design changed and the bronze was never installed there. It went instead to Anne de Montmorency's château at Écouen, where it was set above a doorway, and it was confiscated during the Revolution and brought to the Louvre. It is the largest surviving sculpture by Cellini and the most complete evidence of what Italian artists brought to the French court.
Did You Know? Cellini boasts in his autobiography that he cast the relief himself in his Paris workshop at the Petit Nesle, and that François I called him by the nickname mon ami while inspecting it.
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