All'antica bust of a woman - Rome 18th century

Created in Roman times, revived in Italy at the end of the Renaissance and reaching their technical apogee in the 17th century, portrait busts in polychrome marble bear witness to the great enthusiasm for Antique sculpture among their patrons. The main production centres for this type of mixed marble statuary were in the cities of Rome, Florence and Venice, where technical feats were performed in the best workshops. These busts, mostly combining white marble for the faces and alabaster for the torsos, were used to adorn the galleries of aristocratic palaces and European connoisseurs, evoking the glorious Roman past to which many Italian families felt attached.
Our elegant bust of a woman illustrates this taste for combining rare and expensive coloured marbles, which reached its apogee in Rome with the masterly busts and figures executed around 1600 by the French-born sculptor Nicolas Cordier (1567-1612). Appreciated for their decorative two-tone qualities and the complexity of their construction, these sculptures, often copied from full-length statues, embodied the spirit of the ‘scholarly objects’ sought after by amateur collectors. Made of white marble for the head, caramel-tinted alabaster for the drapery and porphyry for the pedestal, the work shows a young woman in a three-quarter view, dressed in a toga covering a tunic, the suppleness of the drapery skilfully rendered. Her hair is pulled back into a bun and decorated with two fine ribbons, framing a softly modelled face whose style is directly reminiscent of the beauty canons of classical Antiquity in the official bust portraits of emperors and empresses, as well as idealised divinities. In the pure all'antica tradition, the feminine source of inspiration for our portrait is echoed in the great models of ancient sculpture such as the Venus of Milo, the Venus of Arles, Aphrodite of Cnidus or the group of Niobe and her children...