Theseus Fighting the Minotaur
Étienne-Jules Ramey (1796-1852) · 1826
Theseus has thrown the Minotaur to the ground. He presses his left hand on the monster's bull head, kneels on its belly and raises his club to strike, exactly as the museum's early catalogue described it. The hero's body is an academic study of the athletic nude, calm and controlled even in violence, while the Minotaur twists beneath him with a very human torso and a beast's head. The group weighs more than two tonnes; walk around it to see how the diagonal of the club and the sprawl of the monster's legs fill the block.
Ramey, son of a sculptor and a pupil of the Neoclassical generation, showed the plaster model at the Salon of 1822. The king's household ordered the marble for fifteen thousand francs by a decision of July that year, and the finished statue appeared at the Salon of 1827 before entering the Louvre in December. In 1832 it was placed in the Tuileries gardens near the round pond, where it stood for generations as one of the garden's landmark marbles before coming back to the museum.
Did You Know? The marble was displayed for decades in the Tuileries gardens before returning to the Louvre.
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