The Rape of Orithyia by Boreas, Gaspard Marsy; Anselme Flamen

Exhibition Label:
"Corpus," Apr-2012, Kris Ercums
Having failed to successfully woo Orythyia, daughter of the King of Athens, the frustrated personification of the North Wind known as Boreas succumbs to his violent tendencies and abducts his object of desire by force. Gaspard Marsy captures this tumultuous moment in a complex, swirling composition of three figures. With hands held aloft, Orithyia struggles against Boreas who is identified by his puffed-cheeks and winged back, and stands over the gentler West Wind known as Zephyr. This bronze reduction, or smaller scale copy, is derived from a larger version that was intended to decorate the corners of Charles LeBrun’s never-completed garden at Versailles, the Parterre d’Eau (“Flowerbed of Water”).

Archive Label 1999:
Art collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often ordered small bronze casts of famous works for their private collections. The Rape of Orithyia is an eighteenth-century bronze reduction of a seventeenth-century marble sculpture by Gaspar Marsy and Anselme Flamen.

The original marble was conceived within a group of four large-scale public statues, which were to be placed in the Parterre d'eau ("Flowerbed of Water") at the gardens of Versailles. Each sculpture portrayed a mythological "abduction" that symbolized one of the four elements. Marsy and Flamen's piece represented "Air" because Boreas was the Greek god of the wind. Orithyia was the daugther of Erechtheus, the king of Athens, whom Boreas forcibly took to be his bride