Venus Marina, Cupid at Her Side

Benedetto Pistrucci

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Amazingly, the relief’s surface is concave. Benedetto Pistrucci used his drill in a virtuoso excavation of the strata, employing the palest brown to outline the goddess’s shell and team of dolphins, shaping an exquisite bowknot from the foremost brown, and piercing the white layer perilously close to the black ground to define the sail-like drapery and dainty silken reins. The frame of about 1820–30 was later fleshed out with filigree.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art