The Three Graces

The Three GracesA black and white print of Bertel Thorvaldsen's Three Graces the Danish sculptor's Neoclassical rendering of the triad of Charites from Greek mythology: Aglaea (splendour), Euphrosyne (mirth) and Thalia (good cheer), the daughters of Zeus who attended Aphrodite and personified the gifts of grace and beauty. Thorvaldsen spent most of his career in Rome and was, after Canova, the foremost Neoclassical sculptor of the early 19th century. Where Canova

By the 19th century every print publisher with pretensions carried her in some version

and it has been used for performances more or less continuously from antiquity to the present

caught in a golden net

to retrieve a magical ram's fleece held under guard by a sleepless dragon

one of the Argonauts and the leader of the great hunt that killed the Calydonian boar — an enormous beast sent by Artemis to ravage the country in punishment for a neglected sacrifice

The garden lay beyond the ocean in the far west

The composition of the two bodies locked together became a fundamental visual unit of heroic sculpture

sometimes called the Terme Boxer or the Boxer of the Quirinal

Expression became more legible (the furrowed brow of Laocoön

taller figure — that became the standard for the Hellenistic period

the moon goddess who descends nightly to the cave of her sleeping mortal lover

complex drapery