This dramatic group copies an ancient marble discovered in 1711 at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, which was restored shortly afterwards by the French-born Roman Baroque sculptor Pierre Le Gros the Younger. With his addition of new heads and limbs, the Le Gros transformed the marble's subject from Cupid and Psyche into the more tormented mythological couple, Byblis and Caunus. As recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Byblis fell in love with her twin brother, Caunus. When he rejected her advances, she was driven into madness and eventually died from her grief.
Now lost, Le Gros' reimagining of the ancient model won instant fame in 18th-century Rome and was frequently copied and adapted. Perhaps most famously, the Flemish sculptor Laurent Delvaux (1696-1778) created his own adaptation of the model with a terracotta and two marbles, one executed in Rome in 1833 for the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey (inv. no. 5166), and a second version which is now in the Bode Museum, Berlin (inv. no. 4/89). Another marble adaptation, now in the Palazzo Pitti, was made around 1786 by the Florentine sculptor Francesco Carradori (1747-1824). That the model appealed to a Grand Tour audience is attested to by reductions in bronze produced in Rome in the 18th century (see an example in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, inv. no. Н.CK-552).
RELATED LITERATURE
A. Jacobs, Laurent Delvaux, Paris, 1999, pp. 253-259
