Milo of Croton
Pierre Puget (1620-1694) · 1671-1682
The greatest athlete of the ancient world is caught at the moment his strength fails him. Milo of Croton, six times victor at Olympia, tried in old age to split a tree trunk with his bare hands; the wedge slipped, the cleft closed on his fingers, and he was trapped until a wild animal found him. Puget shows the hand jammed in the split trunk, the body wrenched away in a spiral, the mouth open in a cry, and a lion already tearing into his thigh. A victory cup lies overturned at his feet, and the wreath has fallen from his head.
Everything in the carving is designed to convey force meeting resistance. The marble is cut so deeply between limb and torso that light passes right through the group, and the surface veers from the glassy polish of the chest to the shaggy rasped mane of the lion. Circle it: from the front you read the scream, from the left the trapped hand, from behind the great arc of the spine. Puget, a shipbuilder's carver from Marseille who had trained in Genoa and Rome, worked the block over eleven years and signed and dated it 1682, and the group remains the most uncompromising Baroque sculpture made in France.
It was quarried at Carrara in 1671, carved in Toulon, and presented to Louis XIV, who placed it at the entrance to the Allée Royale at Versailles in 1683. Weathering and frost drove it indoors in the nineteenth century, and it entered the Louvre in 1819. Since 1993 it has stood under the glass roof of the Cour Puget, the covered courtyard named after him.
Did You Know? Louis XIV's sister-in-law is said to have wept at the sight of it when the group was unveiled at Versailles in 1683, which Puget took as the highest possible compliment.
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