Arnold Böcklin Swiss, 1827-1901

Purchased directly from Böcklin's studio at the Villa Bellagio, San Domenico, Fiesole 1897; thence by descent

Arnold Böcklin 1827-1901, Kunstmuseum Basel, 1977, p. 247, no. P 3, catalogued; p. 2, illustrated 

The condition of the shield is excellent.
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Böcklin is one of a diverse group of painters across Europe who turned their attention to sculpture towards the end of the 19^th Century, infusing it with colour; an unorthodox approach which unleashed new possibilities in sculpture. The most vocal of these painters was Jean-Léon Gérôme who made the colouration of sculpture something of a cause célèbre by titling one of his paintings Sculpturae vitam insufflate picture (Painting breathes life into sculpture). Like Gérôme, Böcklin was fascinated with the antique and the recent discovery, proved by Gottfried Semper and Georg Treu, that ancient marbles had been polychromed; a fact which Böcklin claimed always to have known. Closer to his own circle were the painters Max Klinger and Fernand Khnopff who also created polychromed sculptures.

Böcklin's Medusa reflects his interest in antique and polychromed sculpture, while interpreting the myth in an intensely symbolist style. Medusa was a theme that Böcklin had explored through a series of paintings. This apotropaic image of the living, severed head was highly suited to a symbolist treatment as it plays on both fear and attraction, the real and the imaginary. Using the shape of an actual shield, and utilising the two and three dimensionality of painting and sculpture, Böcklin has created a conjurer's illusion.

In his hybrid sculpture paintings Böcklin worked with his son-in-law Peter Bruckmann. Blühm has proposed that in the case of the Medusa, Bruckmann modelled the shield and Böcklin added the colour, although the two artists are known also to have exchanged these roles. The first version of the relief was broken on its return from the polychrome sculpture exhibition at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 1885.

RELATED LITERATURE
Heinrich Alfred Schmid, Verzeichnis der Werke Arnold Böcklins, Munich, 1903, no. 6
A. Blühm, The Colour of Sculpture: 1840 - 1910, exh. cat., Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1996,  pp. 134-135