Mercury
After Giambologna (1529-1608) · Late sixteenth or seventeenth century
Mercury seems to weigh nothing. He balances on the toes of his left foot on a puff of breath blown by a wind head, his right leg stretched back, his right arm pointing straight up, the caduceus in his left hand. Winged sandals and a winged cap mark the messenger of the gods. The design is the most famous of all Giambologna's inventions, first modelled in Florence in the 1560s and 1570s and known through the bronze now in the Bargello. It became the very image of movement in sculpture, a figure whose whole mass is lifted onto a single point.
The Louvre's cast, at nearly one metre seventy, dates from between the late sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century and was made after the master's model, by his workshop or a later founder. It is probably the example from the collection of the duke of Brissac, seized during the Revolution, and in 1793 and 1794 it stood in the middle of the Grande Galerie of the new museum. It was later sent to the palace of Compiègne and placed in the garden there, before returning to the Louvre on the twenty-fifth of August 1872.
Did You Know? For a year during the Revolution this bronze stood at the centre of the Grande Galerie, one of the first sculptures displayed in the Louvre as a public museum.
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