Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, La Danse

Groupe en pierre d’Echaillon H. 420 ; L. 298 ; P. 145 cm; pds. 18000 kg Paris, musée d’Orsay

In 1863, Charles Garnier, the architect of the new Paris Opera, commissioned four sculpted groups from four artists who had won the Prix de Rome to decorate the building's façade. Carpeaux was to deal with the theme of dance. For three years, he multiplied sketches and models, before conceiving this whirling farandole of women encircling the genius of dance. The sculptor's main concern was to convey the sensation of movement, which he achieved through a double dynamic, vertical and circular. The leaping genius dominates the whole, dragging the round of the bacchae into imbalance. The public was shocked by the realism of the female nudes, which were deemed unseemly: a bottle of ink was even thrown at the sculpted group, which was ordered to be removed. But the war of 1870, followed by the death of Carpeaux, put an end to the controversy (museum website).