Jean-Jacques Feuchère

Jean-Jacques Feuchère's Satan is emblematic of French Romanticism at its height.

The present model was originally designed as a part of a mantelpiece decoration, with Satan positioned at the center, flanked by two vases in the shape of bats. The plaster model was exhibited at the 1834 Paris Salon, and a small bronze version followed this in 1835.

Satanic subjects were popular among the Romantic artists of the 1830s, who felt inspired by literary works such as Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost  and Goethe’s Faust . Feuchère portrays Satan here as a fallen angel, expelled from heaven, with his wings wrapped around him, which seems broadly derived from Dürer’s Melancholy, circa 1514.

The bronze was ultimately featured on the front cover of the catalogue for the The Romantics to Rodin, a landmark exhibition of nineteenth century, while Rodin’s Thinker graced the back, underscoring Satan's important place in the development of Romantic sculpture and the legacy of 19th century bronzes.

RELATED LITERATURE

P. Fusco, H.W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin. French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North Americain collections, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum, 1980, pp. 266-267;

S. Lami, Dictionnaire des Sculpteurs de l’Ecole Française au Dix-Neuvième siècle, Paris, 1916 (réed. 1970), p. 364-369;

L'Invention du Sentiment aux sources du Romantisme, exh. cat., Paris, musée de la Musique, 2002;

W. Joseph, "Images de Satan entre ange déchu et créature fantastique", in Visages de l'effroi. Violence et fantastique de David à Delacroix, exh. cat. Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris, 2016, pp.184 -193.