Hermes

Hermès tying his sandal. Roman II Century BC

Musée du LouvreThe work of the bronze sculptor Lysippus, a contemporary of Praxiteles and official portraitist to Alexander the Great, focused above all on the male body. A very large number of works are attributed to his workshop.
The image of Hermes tying his sandal while listening to the orders of his father, Zeus, is characteristic of Lysippus's artistic endeavors. It should be remembered, however, that the head, which comes from another copy of the same work, is too small here, and that the incongruous supporting tree trunk under the thigh was added by the Roman copyist when he transposed the bronze original into marble.
Lysippus reworked Polyclitus's canon by lengthening it. The proportions are freer, the head now an eighth of the total height of the body and the muscle structure more slender - except, of course, in the statue of Heracles to your right. The artist sought in addition to situate the figure in a space that was also that of the observer, with a play of light and shade.















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Mercurio y Argos / Argus & Hermes

Sculpture by Felipe Sojo. S. XIX.

Argus was Hera's servant. His great service to the Olympian pantheon was to slay the chthonic serpent-legged monster Echidna as she slept in her cave. Hera's defining task for Argus was to guard the white heifer Io from Zeus, keeping her chained to the sacred olive tree at the Argive Heraion. She charged him to "Tether this cow safely to an olive-tree at Nemea". Hera knew that the heifer was in reality Io, one of the many nymphs Zeus was coupling with to establish a new order. To free Io, Zeus had Argus slain by Hermes. Hermes, disguised as a shepherd, first put all of Argus's eyes asleep with spoken charms, then slew him by hitting him with a stone, the first stain of bloodshed among the new generation of gods.

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