Diana of Versailles (Artemis with a Doe)

The group is a Roman marble made in the time of Hadrian after a lost Greek bronze of the later fourth century BC, often attributed to Leochares, the sculptor who also worked on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Bronze would have allowed the original its thin unsupported limbs, and you can see how the copyist compensated: the deer doubles as a structural prop, and a strut steadies the reaching arm. The drapery is cut with a dry, crisp edge that catches the light along every fold. Several parts, including passages of the arms and the animal, were restored in the sixteenth century by the French sculptor Barthélemy Prieur.

Pope Paul IV sent the statue to Henri II of France in 1556, a diplomatic gift that arrived when French taste for antiquity was at its height. It went first to Fontainebleau, then under Louis XIV to Versailles, where it presided over the Galerie des Glaces and later the Salle des Antiques before being moved to the Louvre in 1798. Generations of French artists learned the ideal female figure from her, and countless garden statues and fountain nymphs across Europe are her descendants.

Did You Know? She stood for more than a century in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, which is how a Roman copy of a Greek bronze ended up named after a French palace.