Fame Riding Pegasus
Antoine Coysevox (1640-1720) · 1698-1702
A winged woman sits astride a rearing winged horse and raises a long trumpet to her lips. She is Fame, and the horse is Pegasus, springing from a rock piled with captured armour, shields and standards. The group is over three metres high and was designed to be seen from below, so the gestures are broad and the silhouette clear: the trumpet lifts the eye upward, the wings spread wide, and the trophies underneath tell you whose fame is being proclaimed. Coysevox cut an inscription on the rock stating that he, sculptor to the king, made the two groups in two years.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart, superintendent of the king's buildings, commissioned the pair in 1698 for the balustrade above the horse pond at Marly, the retreat where Louis the Fourteenth escaped the crowds of Versailles. With its pendant, Mercury Riding Pegasus, it was known as the Fame of the King. In 1719 both were carted to the entrance of the Tuileries gardens, where they stood for more than two and a half centuries before entering the Louvre in 1986. Their departure from Marly is why Guillaume Coustou's rearing horses, a few steps away, were commissioned as replacements.
Did You Know? Coysevox boasted in the inscription itself that he finished both marble groups in only two years.
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