Lot 88: - Francesco Bertos 1678-1741 Italian, Venice, 18th century , A marble group of Hercules and Lichas

measurements note 55cm., 21½in.

C. Avery, The Triumph of Motions: Francesco Bertos (1678-1741) and the Art of Sculpture. Catalogue Raisonne, Turin, 2008, cat. no. 37, p. 176, and figs. 23-24.

The Venetian sculptor Francesco Bertos has long been recognized as the foremost bronze sculptor active in Venice in the 18υth century, and one of the most original - and most bizarre - minds in the history of European sculpture. He is particularly well known for his circus-like pyramids of allegorical figures, in which on the one hand the Baroque art of allegorical personifications culminates, while on the other hand the choice of subjects reflects the proto-illuministic compulsion to systematically classify human knowledge, as it is evident in Linné's botanical nomenclature and a few years later in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie.

Charles Avery's recent monograph on Bertos has fully established the artist's position in the history of European sculpture. Thanks to Avery's research, one segment of Bertos's activity, which was hitherto much neglected - his activity as a marble sculptor - emerges as one of the most interesting aspects, and one in which Bertos excelled even on a purely technical level. This marble of Hercules and Lichas epitomizes the sculptor's ability to show the muscular male nude in athletic action.

The episode of Hercules and Lichas is taken from the final moment of the ancient myth. Far from being a heroic deed, it shows Hercules' madness and death, which was also chosen by Seneca for his Hercules play. After Hercules was sent his shirt tainted with Nessus's blood by his wife Deianira, who had hoped that the centaur's blood would have aphrodisiac effects on him, it turned out to be poisonous. The marble shows Hercules throwing his servant Lichas - who had brought the shirt to his master - into the ocean, with the mortiferous garment waving in the wind. With its many undercuttings it shows Bertos's virtuosity in marble carving as well as his inventiveness in treating a subject that should demonstrate Hercules' physical power for the last time.