Getty Museum
Dancing Faun
Creator
Giovanni Battista FogginiItalian Artist · 1652–1725
All works by this person →After training in Florence, Giovanni Battista Foggini was sent to Rome in 1673 by Cosimo III de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, to attend the new Accademia Fiorentina. He returned home in 1676 with the characteristic Baroque, painterly style he kept for life. Foggini's reliefs often display contrasting diagonals and skies with mythological or Christian figures amid clouds and shafts of light. Drap
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1700
- Medium
- Bronze
- Culture
- Italian
- Department
- Sculpture
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Because of his association with Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, the faun usually appears in art with a goatlike face, pointed ears, a tail, and horns. Identified by the Romans as Pan, the god of woods and field, flocks and herds, he was able to charm nymphs with his music. This subject, common in antiquity, regained popularity in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Giovanni Battista Foggini, who worked at a time when Florence witnessed an intense interest in the production of bronze reductions of ancient works, based this sculpture on a Hellenistic marble statue in the collection of the Galleria degli Uffizi. Along with only two others of the many known copies of the ancient work, this one includes the tree trunk from the ancient marble, which draws a parallel to the antique but is not needed for support. He may have created the sculpture as a diplomatic gift from the Medici court.
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