French school, following models of AUGUSTIN PAJOU (Paris, 1730-1809); XIX century.

French school, following models of AUGUSTIN PAJOU (Paris, 1730-1809); XIX century.
"Marie Antoinette".
Marble.
Signed.
Measurements: 58,5 x 38 x 19 cm.
This work carved in marble follows the model of the famous bust of Marie Antoinette conceived in 1774 in the manufactory of Sèvres and preserved today in the Musée Carnavalet. Since the 19th century, many French workshops produced variants in terracotta and plaster following the design of the sculptor Augustin Pajou, consolidating the reference model of the queen's youthful iconography. Although it should be noted that the original attribution has been the subject of historiographical debate among specialists, who have pointed out the possible intervention of sculptors such as Lemoyne or Boizot in some of the prototypes.
The work presented here fully participates in this phenomenon of historicist re-reading: it combines the idealized elegance characteristic of late-baroque court portraiture with the neoclassical sense of purity and restraint associated with the French school of the late 18th century. Its style evokes the formal matrices created around the Carnavalet bust and disseminated both by the royal manufactory and by the artistic literature and art market of the 19th century, which consolidated the typology as an emblematic image of the sovereign.
Far from being limited to a literal reproduction, this marble reinterprets with museistic sobriety the physiognomy and bearing of the young queen, underlining the survival of Pajou's model or that which historiography has considered its equivalent as a canon of representation in later French sculpture.