Nymph with a Shell
Unknown · 125-150 AD
A young woman sits on the ground, her legs folded to one side, holding a large shell in her lap. Her chiton has slipped from one breast and her right leg is bare to the thigh. Waves are carved on the plinth beneath her, so she is a nymph of the sea or of a spring. The head, with hair drawn back in bands and knotted in a bun, is ancient but belongs to a different statue, a goddess, and was mounted here in modern times. The right shoulder and arm, the left forearm, parts of the feet and much of the plinth are restorations.
The body was carved in the second quarter of the second century AD, at the end of Hadrian's reign, probably as a fountain figure: water would have spilled from the shell. It came to the Louvre in 1807 with the Borghese collection, but its fame in France is older. In the seventeenth century Antoine Coysevox carved a marble copy of it for the gardens of Versailles. Notice how the shell, the wave and the slipping dress all speak of water without a single drop.
Did You Know? Antoine Coysevox copied this nymph in marble for Versailles, so the Borghese original had a French twin decades before it moved to Paris.
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