Minerva protector of the arts att. to Josse-François Leriche (1738-1812)
Sumptuously helmeted and draped, Minerva stands beside a fragment of the famous Belvedere Torso, preserved since the 16th century in the Vatican Museums. Her dress is pleated and knotted, the falling and falling fabric finely underlined by two lines at the edge. At her feet, a painter’s palette and brushes, a sculptor’s chisel, a globe and parchments. A treatise on geometry and musical scores stand alongside an olive branch. The goddess unites the liberal and fine arts, science and creation.
The dazzling profusion of detail, from the locks of her hair to the scrolls, shows the skill of a sculptor accustomed to working with small formats. This type of statuette, intended for wealthy and learned collectors, rarely achieves this degree of decorative elegance. What’s more, the perfection of all the viewpoints, and the surprises delicately incised into each plane, arouse wonder and encourage us to turn the statuette over in our hands.
This cluster of clues suggests that this statuette was conceived as a work intended as a model for a cookie statuette. Founded by Louis XIV in the 18th century, the Manufacture Royale de Sèvres is France’s center for the production of cookies of the highest artistic quality. Since 1773, Louis-Simon Boizot, a sculptor approved by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, has headed the workshops at the Manufacture de Sèvres. Under his direction, pleasing figurines were created that popularized the new style of neoclassicism. The finely executed drapery follows the shape of the body, the viewpoints multiply the surprises, and the decorative details are executed with great mastery. Boizot develops his skills as a marble sculptor in small dimensions.
Models were first made in terracotta and then, if it was decided to reproduce them in cookie, transferred to plaster for casting. As director of the Manufacture’s workshops, Boizot delivered drawn or modeled models, while his chef d’atelier, Josse-François Leriche, was responsible for executing them with equal virtuosity in terracotta and plaster, and overseeing cookie production. Boizot and Leriche worked so closely together that their work often overlapped. Leriche, trained and influenced by Boizot, gradually developed his own activity at the Manufacture, even exhibiting a cookie under his own name at the Salon of 1801.
While the iconography of our statuette tends towards post-French Revolution neoclassicism, its drapery and cannon still belong to neoclassicism tinged with Louis XVI style. Its harmoniously classic face is inspired by the features developed by Boizot in his Vertus sculptures for the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris: hemmed lips, rectangular face and pronounced chin. Our Minerva thus bridges the gap between the precious sophistication of Ancien Régime art, and the new times that herald modernity.