Icarus (3) Recent & contemporary sculptures

Below is the large statue of Icarus and Daedalus in Creta, located at Agia Galini, where it is said Icarus and Daedalus escaped from the King Minos.

With regard to the contemporary versions, I subjectively selected some works that all had Icarus as their title, to avoid the numerous 'flying' or 'angels' versions that may express similar poses but may not have been conceived with a link to the Icarus myth.

Stefan Balkenhol - Icarus - Bronze sculpture - 2006

Lucianne Lassalle - Icarus - Bronze sculpture - 2013

Lucianne Lassalle - Icarus - Bronze sculpture - 2013

 

Leo Krajden - American artist - Icarus 2012

Leather sculpture - author unknown

Igor Mitoraj - He did numerous Icarus versions, some already shared in this blog here. Here are three more!

Ira Reines was born in New York in 1957, and worked with Art Deco Master Erte.
Below his 'Icarus'.

Frank Eliscu (1912–1996) was an American sculptor and art teacher who designed and created the Heisman Trophy in 1935 when he was only 20 years old. It is one of the greatest honors a college athlete can receive.  Eliscu also is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Below his Icarus. Is it the sun he is holding in his right hand ?

Anna Gillespie - British sculptor born in 1964 - Icarus - (with a hint on globalwarming).

Csilla Varga, born in Hungary in 1975 and lives in London, England. Sculpture of Icarus, visible at Neil Peat Gallery.

And the last ones for this post are some Icarus sculptures for the Air Force.
Here below for the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum (Illinois, USA).

And here in Hungary, at the Air Force HQ in Zenun near Belgrade.

Jason and the Golden Fleece, by Bertel Thorvaldsen (Jason et la Toison d'Or)

This beautiful Jason with the Golden Fleece, male hero from the Greek mythology, was sculpted by Bertel Thorvaldsen, a Danish sculptor mentioned before in this blog for his Ganymède and his Achille.

This sculpture is considered by many as the masterpiece of Thorvaldsen’s work. It was initially done in clay, life size, in 1802, to show his sculpting ability to the Copenhagen Academy. The nude aspect of the sculpture may have been inspired by the Apollo Belvedere, sculpture that we mentioned previously in this blog as part of the male art in the Vatican.

Bertel Thorvaldsen, from Denmark, is born in 1770, and died in 1844. He spent a major part of his life in Italy (Rome), and would be in the line of the best neoclassicists sculptors, like the Italian Antonio Canova. Canova who apparently was impressed by the Jason sculpture (see 19th century art website in the sources).

Painting of Bertel Thorvaldsen by Rudolf Suhrlandt - 1810 - detail

Drawing of Thorvalden 'Jason' sculpture, by Ferdinando Mori - 1809

Thorvaldsen received a commission from Thomas Hope, a British art lover, to sculpt his Jason in marble, larger than the clay model, and this sculpture of 242 cm (95 inches) will take 25 years to be achieved. The long and exciting story of it can be read in detail here. The marble sculpture was purchased by the Thorvaldsen Museum in 1917, at an auction following Hope's death.

The only known sketch of Jason done by Thorvaldsen - c.1800-1802

Below is a lithograph, dated 1872, made by Thorvald Jensen, showing Thomas Hope arriving in Thorvaldsen' studio to buy Jason with the Golden Fleece.

For those interested in the Greek mythology of Jason's legend: ''Jason was a Greek mythological prince whose wicked uncle Pelias had unjustly taken power from Jason’s father, King Aison. To win back the throne, Jason needed to obtain the Golden Fleece, which was guarded by a dangerous dragon in a far-off land. Jason sailed off with his men to find it, and after surviving numerous dangers and challenges, the brave young man and his comrades finally found the Fleece; this sculpture depicts the proud Jason at the moment where, with the Fleece draped over his arm, he is going down to the ship that will return him to his fatherland.
The Fleece was magical, and guaranteed fertility and wealth to the land that possessed it – so by obtaining it, Jason established that he was not only a prince in name, but indeed, equipped to rule his land in the best possible way. The notion that a person’s station in society is not determined by inherited privileges, but by his or her human abilities, is a fundamental democratic principle. As is well known, classical Greece was the cradle of democracy, and Thorvaldsen’s Jason made its appearance on the artistic scene at precisely the moment when pro-democracy sentiment was making a powerful impact in Europe."

The Copenhagen Thorvaldsen Museum :

As published in the Anderson guide in 1887

The Library

The Danish Post Office decided to create the first Danish Art Stamp with his name, to celebrate his return to Denmark, and his nomination as Citizen of Honour in Copenhagen.

• Denmark 1938. The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, after a painting by C.W. Eckersberg.
• Denmark 1938. Sculpture by Bertel Thorvaldsen, "Jason with the Golden Fleece".  

 

Sources:
Wikipedia
The Thorvaldsen Museum
The Hope Commission story


19th century art website 

Icarus (2) old engravings

Below are some Icarus and Daedalus engravings. Engraving is taking out material, from glass, wood, stone so I link it to sculpture, although I agree it is very close to drawing!  Famous artists have depicted Icarus with that technique.
Here is a colored woodcut, made by one of my favourite engraver, Albrecht Dürer, in 1493, showing Icarus and his father flying, just before the fall of Icarus.

Here is an Italian engraving (school of Finiguerra) showing the Cretan labyrinth.
Maso Finiguerra (1426-1464) was an engraver (but also a goldsmith) working in Florence. Giorgio Giorgio Vasari declared that he invented the process of engraving to print paper, but it is now proven that Germany developed it before Italy.

The engraving below was done in 1588 by Hendrick Goltzius, showing the Fall of Icarus. Based on a Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem design.

And here is a woodcut made by the German engraver Virgil Solis (1514-1562), to illustrate the Ovide's Metamorphoses book relating the myth of Icarus. He made 183 engravings for Ovid texts. This engraving is visible in Glasgow. He was influenced by the French engraver Bernard Salomon.

 And the Salomon version here from 1557:

In France, we found one engraving from Bernard Picart (1673-1733), who was extremely talented even at a young age, possibly due to his father's skills and good practice at the Royal Academy. Indeed at the age of sixteen he got honors at the Academy of Paris. He established fully in Amsterdam, in 1710, which was a major center for both publishing and printmaking.
This engraving 'The Fall of Icarus' originates from The Temple of the Muses, a portfolio of sixty plates both designed and engraved by Bernard Picart.

Sources :
Wikipedia
http://www.artoftheprint.com/artistpages/picart_bernard_thefallicarus.htm
https://issuu.com/eliczek/docs/daedalus_and_icarus_representations

Icarus (1) Classical sculptures

Since my childhood and the reading of Mythology Tales, followed by classical studies and trips to Greece, Italy and Egypt, I always kept an interest towards mythology.
So today you will see a first post about Icarus & Daedalus sculptures, which will be followed by one or two posts about more recent & contemporary sculptures of them. I will add my version of it as well, done in blue alabaster.

Below is a bas-relief done in the 17th century, with a Cretan labyrinth, visible at the Musée Antoine Vivenel in Compiègne (France).

A short summary of the Legend (re-written/shortened from Wikipedia):

''Icarus' father Deaedalus, a very talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a ball of string in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.

Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before trying to escape the island, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared into the sky, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which due to the heat melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea in the area which today bears his name, the Icarian sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.''

The fall of Icarus has been sculpted (and painted) numerous times. So I only suggest a very subjective selection of sculptures. Let start with a magnificent white marble sculpture achieved by Paul Ambroise Slodtz (1702-1758), the death of Icarus, displayed in the Louvre museum.

Here is a medallion from the 18th century, showing Icarus fall, the author is unknown. Located in the Louvre Museum collection in Paris. 

Below, the first masterpiece from the sculptor Canova, dated 1779, commissioned by Pisani, procurator of the Venetian republic. This 'group sculpture' in marble shows Icarus' father attaching the wings to his son's arms. This sculpture is visible at the Museo Correr in Venice (Italy).

Not too long after that, the French sculptor Henri Joseph Ruxthiel sculpted the same type of scene, a bas-relief showing Daedalus attaching the wings to Icarus' body. It is located in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris.

To finish today's post, here is a bronze sculpture from Sir Alfred Gilbert (1854 – 1934), son of professional musicians, who was an English sculptor and also a goldsmith (he was passionate about bronze casting techniques). This is a bronze with a very dark patina, placed on an ebonised wood plinth.

This art piece representing Icarus was commissioned by Frederic Lord Leighton in 1882 after the exhibition of Perseus Arming at the Grosvenor Gallery. Lord Leighton, a painter and a sculptor, was already mentioned in this blog here, and had already painted the subject of Icarus, see below. 

Sources:
Wikipedia
National Gallery of Art

http://lemythedicare.unblog.fr/category/le-mythe-dicare-arts-plastiques/

Abel (2) by Vincent Emile Feugère des Forts

The other Abel sculpture I want to share is from the French sculptor Vincent Emile Feugères des Forts (1825-1889). His 'death of Abel' was first created in plaster, and he showed it at the 'Salon' in 1864, for which he got a medal. You can see the plaster sculpture in Chartres, at the 'Musée des Beaux- Arts'.
He then sculpted it in marble, and presented it two years later. It is a very sensual sculpture of a young man lying on the ground.

The marble sculpture is in Paris, at the Musée d'Orsay. A cast in bronze was reportedly also visible at the Chateau des Forts (Illiers), during the end of the 19th century but I could not find any trace of it.

In March 2007, the Musée d'Orsay, in his 'Correspondance' serie (in which an artist is invited to choose a Museum art piece and to present his work next to it), displayed the contemporary visions of the French artists Pierre & Gilles (previously mentioned in this blog here), who choose 'The death of Abel', and painted him, not once but 3 times, so as to give a 3D vision of this Abel, around his sculpture. An interesting way to see that sculpture with a new eye.

Here are the photographs of their 3 paintings, taken by 'Lunettes Rouges', an art blogger from the French newspaper 'Le Monde'.

Sources :

Wikipedia
Musée d'Orsay

Pierre & Gilles video interview (Italian & French)
The ''Amateur d'Art'' blog of Lunettes Rouges