Diana and Endymion
Joseph (Giuseppe) Plura (1777-1786)
Date: 1752
Place Made: England
Materials & Techniques: Carved marble
Dimensions: 52 cm x 54 cm
Accession Number: The Holburne Museum, 1997.1
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This is an ornamental sculpture designed to go on a stand in the Hall, Drawing Room or Picture Gallery of a private house.
It is made from a solid block of marble, a kind of stone. The sculptor started this piece by making a model in clay. He used this model to see the shape of the piece and then drilled into the block of marble at different points, considering which areas needed to be drilled deeply and which needed to be left. He then started chipping the shape out roughly, going round and round the block to the depth of the drill-holes, and being careful not to take too much off anywhere. He continued to keep moving round the block as he made the shape finer and more detailed.
He finished the detail of the textures and polished the surface with emery, a fine powder used by carvers, gem-workers and jewellers for all sorts of mineral and metals.
The statue group was made in Bath in 1752 by Giuseppe Plura, a sculptor who came to Bath from Turin in Italy, then becoming 'Joseph Plura'.
It is easy for the small, jutting out parts of this sculpture to be knocked and for this reason Diana’s ankle and Cupid’s hand have been repaired.
Teachers' Information
The marble came from Italy and was very expensive: it is a well chosen piece with no veinings or flaws that would upset the work. Plura had just come to Bath from Turin in Italy, where marble was a natural and traditional material to work in and readily available. He married a local girl, Mary, the daughter of John Ford, a builder who worked in stone and masterminded John Wood's great Bath building schemes in Bath stone. In this piece the variations in texture and lively composition are typical of rococo sculpture of the mid 18th century, which was very adventurous in using dramatic compositions with lots of texture and depth. No other work of this scale by this sculptor is known, and he died soon after, but it was considered a wonder by local residents.
The story: the god Zeus agreed with Endymion the shepherd to give him eternal beauty, on condition that he spent his life asleep. The moon goddess, Diana, fell in love with him and visited him every night hoping he would wake, but he never did. This story explained the moon's rising and apparent movement across the sky.
Activities
1. Discuss what skills the sculptor needed to make this piece.
2. Ask your class to think about why Plura made this. He never sold it, and it lived with him till he died, first in his shop in Bath, then in London.
3. Ask your pupils to design a sculpture 'in the round' (designed to be seen from all angles). How many drawings from different angles should they make? They could create a clay or plasticine model to help them consider their sculpture from all sides.