The Sculpture That EXPOSED Greek Mythology

[00:00:01]The highest compliment the ancient world could give a beautiful woman was to say she looked like a statue.

[00:00:08]Still flawless.

[00:00:11]Every proportion in its place.

[00:00:14]Nothing moving.

[00:00:16]2,000 years ago the poet [music] Ovid used those exact words in the Metamorphoses.

[00:00:22]He described a young woman named Andromeda chained to a rock beside the sea and wrote that a hero flying overhead would mistaken her for a marble statue.

[00:00:33]Except that her hair moved in the wind and tears ran down her face.

[00:00:40]Centuries later a sculptor in Rome named Domenico Guidi read that passage [music] and did the strangest thing possible.

[00:00:48]He carved her into marble.

[00:00:51]He took a woman described as so beautiful she looked like stone.

[00:00:55]The sculpture is called Andromeda and the sea monster.

[00:01:01]Nearly life-sized carved from white Carrara marble it captures a single second.

[00:01:07]Not the moment Andromeda is chained to the rock and not the moment she is rescued.

[00:01:14]The instant in between.

[00:01:16]She believes she is about to die.

[00:01:18]Then something catches her eye. Her head lifts. Her gaze locks onto a point [music] in the sky.

[00:01:26]One hand opens slightly suspended between terror and the first spark of hope.

[00:01:32]She has just seen Perseus.

[00:01:34]Today the sculpture stands in the Metropolitan Museum [music] of Art in New York.

[00:01:39]And to understand why people look at it and call it one of the most beautiful works carved since the age of Michelangelo you have to start with the marble itself.

[00:01:52]Look at the surfaces and remember that every part of the sculpture comes from a single block of marble.

[00:01:59]Andromeda's skin is polished so finely that it catches light the way real skin does.

[00:02:05]Soft, almost glowing from within.

[00:02:09]Beside her, the sea monster, the Cetus of Greek mythology, is carved completely differently.

[00:02:16]Its scales are rough and matte, swallowing light instead of reflecting it.

[00:02:21]Below them, the rock is jagged and coarse.

[00:02:24]Off to the side, the marble becomes flowing water and a cliff face.

[00:02:29]One material, four completely different worlds. Skin, scales, stone, and sea.

[00:02:38]That is the real trick hidden beneath the beauty.

[00:02:42]Guidi did not just carve a woman, he carved four different substances from the same [music] block of white Carrara marble, and made you forget they were ever the same thing.

[00:02:54]Now look at how she is built.

[00:02:56]Her legs pull one way, her body twists, her head turns the other.

[00:03:02]Sculptors call it a figura serpentinata, the spiraling flame-like shape that runs through Baroque sculpture like a signature.

[00:03:11]The entire figure climbs the rock on a long [music] diagonal.

[00:03:15]Nothing about her is still, which is the exact opposite of what marble wants to be.

[00:03:22]And the pose was borrowed.

[00:03:25]A century earlier, the painter Annibale Carracci had painted Andromeda in almost this exact position on the walls of the Farnese Gallery in Rome, stretched across the rock, wrists chained, one open hand lifted toward the sky.

[00:03:42]Guidi took a famous painting and stood it upright in three dimensions.

[00:03:48]Suddenly, you could walk around the picture.

[00:03:51]It was an idea Bernini had helped make famous.

[00:03:55]And Guidi had learned it in the workshop of Bernini's great rival, [music] Alessandro Algardi.

[00:04:01]The figure does not simply occupy space.

[00:04:04]It reaches into it.

[00:04:06]The empty air around Andromeda becomes part of the sculpture [music] itself.

[00:04:11]Something she is struggling against.

[00:04:14]Something she is trying to escape.

[00:04:19]And here is what all that beauty is hiding.

[00:04:23]Andromeda is not posing.

[00:04:25]She is bait.

[00:04:27]Her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the sea nymphs, and the gods answered the insult with a punishment.

[00:04:36]They demanded the girl.

[00:04:39]So Andromeda was stripped, chained to a rock beside the sea, and left for a monster to devour, all because of a compliment her mother could not stop repeating.

[00:04:50]Her beauty is the [music] reason she is there.

[00:04:53]It sparked the boast, brought the punishment, and in a few moments it will bring the man [music] who saves her.

[00:05:01]The most beautiful thing in the room is not a goddess, not a queen, but a girl condemned to die, captured at the exact instant she still does not know how her story ends.

[00:05:17]The man who carved her was Domenico Guidi, born in the marble town of Carrara, and trained in the workshop of Alessandro Algardi, Bernini's greatest rival in Baroque Rome.

[00:05:30]After Bernini's death, Guidi became one of the leading sculptors in the city.

[00:05:35]The artist you turned to if you wanted marble that seemed to move.

[00:05:41]Around the same time he was carving Andromeda [music] and the sea monster, he was creating an altar group of St. Joseph for a Roman church.

[00:05:50]The same flowing drapery, the same naturalistic rock.

[00:05:55]The work of a sculptor at the absolute height of his powers.

[00:06:00]And what happened to this piece? Perhaps the finest thing he ever made became its own quiet tragedy.

[00:06:10]It was a commission.

[00:06:12]Francesco II d'Este, the Duke of Modena, had ordered it.

[00:06:16]But in 1694, before the marble was finished, the Duke died.

[00:06:23]When Guidi wrote to the new Duke asking to be paid for the Andromeda he had been hired to carve, the reply was astonishing.

[00:06:31]The heir claimed he could find no record of the commission at all.

[00:06:36]There is no evidence Guidi was ever paid.

[00:06:40]So, the greatest sculptor [music] in Rome was left with a finished life-size masterpiece.

[00:06:45]A sculpture nobody would claim and nobody had paid for.

[00:06:50]It simply sat in his workshop.

[00:06:53]Years later, John Cecil, the 5th Earl of Exeter, was touring the studios of Rome when he saw it and bought the unwanted Andromeda on the spot.

[00:07:03]Then fate intervened again.

[00:07:06]The Earl died on the journey home.

[00:07:08]The statue reached England without him and spent the next 250 years standing in Burghley House.

[00:07:16]The sculpture was admired enough that other artists copied it, producing smaller versions in bronze and lead >> [music] >> that still survive today in France and England.

[00:07:26]But the original masterpiece survived only because a forgotten marble, abandoned in a Roman workshop, >> [music] >> happened to catch the eye of a passing traveler.

[00:07:39]And then came the [music] final insult.

[00:07:42]The world forgot who made it.

[00:07:45]One visitor recorded the truth in 1727.

[00:07:50]Domenico Guidi carved in plain ink.

[00:07:53]A few years [music] later, someone guessed it was the work of another sculptor, Pierre Etienne Monnot.

[00:08:00]The guess was wrong and somehow it became history.

[00:08:04]For more than two centuries, one of the most beautiful [music] sculptures in England carried the wrong name.

[00:08:10]Guidi's authorship was not restored [music] until 1994.

[00:08:14]He created the masterpiece, was never paid for it, and then lost his own name on it for nearly 260 years.

[00:08:23]So, stand in front of her and ask what beauty is worth.

[00:08:28]This is, [music] to many people, one of the most beautiful sculptures ever carved.

[00:08:34]It is also a young woman chained to a rock [music] to be devoured, punished for being beautiful, carved by an artist who lost both his payment and his credit.

[00:08:46]Look one more time at her face turned toward the sky and at the open hand frozen between fear and hope.

[00:08:56]Ovid wrote that she was so still, so perfect, that you might mistake her for a marble statue.

[00:09:04]Standing here, you finally can't tell the difference because now she is one.

[00:09:13]I read every comment. So, tell me which one you carry out of the room, the beauty or everything it cost.