Icarus is the second of Gilbert’s series of three autobiographical bronzes. After the success of Perseus Arming, symbolic of the sculptor’s ‘need to train adequately before entering the arena of the public exhibition’ (Dorment 1986, op. cit., p. 106), Icarus is meant to symbolize ‘Gilbert’s ambition to free himself at whatever cost of material constraints’ (ibid.) and his Comedy and Tragedy ‘refers to the violent contrast between his public success and profound private unhappiness’ (ibid.).

The prime cast of Icarus was made in Naples in 1884 by the Sabatino de Angelis foundry. Now in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (inv. NMW A 116), this unique 106cm high bronze was a direct commission from Frederic, Lord Leighton as an encouragement to the twenty-eight-year-old Gilbert. Leighton gave Gilbert complete freedom to choose the subject. Still living in Rome, where he had gone to carve his Kiss of Victory in marble, Gilbert was deeply under the influence of the Italian Renaissance sculptors and especially Florentine bronzes by Donatello, Cellini and Giambologna. Gilbert’s genius is to be able to absorb the varying styles of all these past masters and to reinterpret them in a model that is unmistakably his own.

Gilbert’s brings an intense eroticism combined with a deep sense of introspection to this classic mythological subject. The ideal youthful anatomy of Icarus is enveloped by massive wings, perfectly balanced in a languid contrapposto composition. Icarus looks down impassively towards a bird at his feet being devoured by a snake.

Gilbert continued to explore many of the key elements in Icarus throughout his career. If one could imagine that Icarus were to stand on one leg and spread his wings he would be immediately transformed into the figure of Anteros on the Shaftesbury Memorial at Piccadilly Circus, completed in 1893. Whilst, Gilbert’s extraordinary statuette of St Michael, made for the Clarence Tomb in Windsor, 1889-1900, is an elaborate re-imagining of Icarus.

The sculptor William Goscombe John, who gave the original Icarus to Cardiff, claimed that there were no more than a dozen casts made of Icarus, because Gilbert broke the plaster before he went to Bruges in 1901. Casts were made for Robert Dunthorne for sale by the Rembrandt Gallery, but there is no record of the Compagnie des Bronze foundry in Brussels having made casts between 1900 and 1920, although the parts for casting do appear to have been available. Other casts are known in the Tate Gallery (inv. N04827), Birmingham Art Gallery (inv. 1973P32), Ashmolean Museum (Penny, op. cit.), and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (inv. 3607-D3).

RELATED LITERATURE

A. Bury, Shadow of Eros, London 1954, p. 82, pl. VIII; R. Dorment, Alfred Gilbert, New Haven and London, 1985, pp. 46-49; R. Dorment, Alfred Gilbert. Sculptor and Goldsmith, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London 1986, p. 110-112, nos. 15-17; N. Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum. 1540 to the Present Day, Oxford, 1992, vol. 3, pp. 74-76, no. 500