MUSE-CLIO-STATUE-GRECO ROMAN ART-PL.98 [Jan DE BISSCHOP, 1668]

98. – This original antique print shows a statue of a seated muse on a bench, possibly Clio, leaning on her left arm and looking at right. The statue, now without its head, right arm and fingers of the left hand, is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This is a decorative Hellenistic work or a Roman copy which, in its present fragmentary state, still has some late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century additions (right knee and right foot). The etching shows a restored sculpture in reverse, the sides of the base being in different shape than at present. It was made after a drawing by Jacques de Gheyn III, which was in the possession of Jan Wtenbogaert in Amsterdam. Neither this drawing nor any intermediary drawings by De Bisschop have been traced. The statue is not included in the list of contents and locations, which means he did not know where it was. In his ‘Address to the Spectator’ he explicitly says that De Gheyn’s drawings were not made in Italy, he obviously thought the statue had left Italy for England or France, after Cavalieri’s book was published and before De Gheyn made his drawing. (ref: British Museum).