Sappho

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Sappho was an archaic Greek poet who lived on the island of Lesbos around 630-570 BC. The renowned lyric poet wrote extensively about love and women. Unfortunately, most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, but her surviving works are mostly fragmented except for one complete poem, "Ode to Aphrodite." In addition to lyric poetry, ancient critics believed that Sappho composed elegiac and iambic poetry as well. Three epigrams attributed to Sappho exist, but they are actually Hellenistic imitations of her style. Sappho is a famous subject in Bourdelle's work. Initially conceived in 1887, this monumental version was first cast in 1924. One of his large-scale casts of this subject was displayed at the Jardin des Tuileries during his 1931 retrospective at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Peter Cannon-Brookes praises the work's success: "The composition is one of Bourdelle's most architectonic sculptures, developed with the certainty of an architectural complex, and sharply defined volumes are linked together with utmost clarity.... Sappho is intensely modern in its treatment, and the reduction of many forms to symbols demonstrates his closeness to contemporary developments in abstract sculpture" (Peter Cannon-Brookes).