Leda and the Swan

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carrier-Belleuse, best known as the employer of Rodin, was an essential participant in the eclectic Second Empire style. Here he unites elements from seemingly irreconcilable opposites: the composition of a brooding, supine Leda by Michelangelo, from a lost painting familiar through copies, and the fancy attributes and svelte line of the Diana of Fontainebleau, a French Mannerist marble in the Louvre long attributed to Jean Goujon. Carrier's approaches to the handling of surface and to the character of the drama are lighthearted, showing the fullness of his debt to the eighteenth-century master ofterracotta statuettes, Clodion. To the lessons of past masters he adds touches entirely his own—notably, the crinkled drapery and the delightful way in which Leda's long fingers echo the sinuous line of the swan's neck. Carrier's terracottas, cast but with details modeled and added by hand, were a staple of Second Empire decoration. A variant composition of the Leda exists in bronze; larger statuettes in terracotta (19-11/16 in.) as well as plaster (23-5/8 in.) were in his studio sale of 1887.

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