A PAIR OF IVORY BUSTS OF THALIA AND MELPOMENE
Lot 222

A PAIR OF IVORY BUSTS OF THALIA AND MELPOMENE

19TH CENTURY

Closed26 February 2008

Price Realised

GBP 12,500

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A PAIR OF IVORY BUSTS OF THALIA AND MELPOMENE
19TH CENTURY
After the Antique, on fluted columnar pedestals
10¼in. (26cm.); and 10¾in. (27.3cm.) high (2)

Specialist note

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:
F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique - The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1981, p. 343.
N. Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum 1540 to the present day, Oxford, 1992, I, no. 3. and no. 20.

Thalia is derived from the Roman full-length seated figure of the 2nd century AD in the Museo Pio-Celementino, Vatican, and is itself a copy of a lost Greek original. The Roman marble entered the Papal collection in 1774 after being discovered, along with a series of other muses, in excavations conducted by Domenico de' Angelis at the Villa di Cassio, Tivoli, before 1773.