Diana the Huntress (1782)
Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828)
bronze.
Standing more than six feet tall and weighing almost 750 pounds, Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Diana the Huntress was his first life-sized bronze sculpture. It was commissioned by banker Jean Girardot de Marigny, whose name is inscribed on the base, for the garden of his Paris mansion. Houdon’s decision to portray Diana, the goddess of the hunt, wearing nothing but a crescent moon in her hair was unusual in the eighteenth century.
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