Titan Struck Down
Francois Dumont (1688-1726) · 1712
A naked giant tumbles head first down a rock, one leg kicking into the air, his face pressed against the ground and his hair spilling over the stones. He is one of the Titans who dared to storm Olympus and were struck down by Jupiter's thunderbolt, and the sculptor has caught the instant of the fall itself. Look at the flames licking the rock behind him and at the impossible, inverted pose: the whole group is a bravura exercise in anatomy seen upside down, the kind of virtuoso problem that young sculptors loved to set themselves.
Francois Dumont presented the marble to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture on 24 September 1712 as his reception piece, after a model made the previous year. Falling giants were a favourite theme for such pieces, since they allowed a candidate to show the male nude under stress. Dumont died young, in 1726, and this remains his best-known work. Confiscated with the Academy's collection in August 1793, it passed through the museum of the French school at Versailles and probably entered the Louvre in 1849.
Did You Know? The Titan is carved upside down, so the sculptor had to prove he could handle anatomy with the body inverted.
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