French school, ca. 1900

French school, ca. 1900.
"Female figure".
Marble.
Measurements: 40 cm (height).
Bust carved in marble round bulk, Belle Époque period and fully Art Nouveau aesthetics. Thus, we see a female figure with wavy hair and melancholic attitude, carved with great virtuosity. The woman is considered in Art Nouveau, under the influence of symbolist literature, as a being of transformation and metamorphosis, and therefore is usually reflected with extreme fantasy, being associated with the supernatural and the unknown. The feminine is intimately associated with the hidden part of nature, with the mysterious and therefore attractive and seductive.
The term Belle Époque designates the period of European history between the last decade of the 19th century and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. It responds to a nostalgic vision that tended to idealize the pre-1914 past as a paradise lost after the brutal trauma of the First World War. With respect to art, it was the time of development of the three pictorial currents that would mark the 20th century: expressionism, fauvism and cubism, as well as modernism. If in painting and large-scale sculpture the avant-garde dominated, in decorative sculpture and objets d'art the modernist influence in all its forms dominated.