Aeneas

The title of this figurative bronze sculpture, Aeneas, is taken from Greco-Roman mythology. In it a nude, muscular male figure leans to the left, and appears to be holding, carrying or embracing another smaller figure, perched on his right thigh. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas was a Trojan who was instructed by the gods to leave as Troy fell. Aeneas took a group with him, and has frequently been depicted in art as a muscular man gathering or carrying another person, as in the 1598 painting La Fuga Di Enea Da Troia (Aeneas' Flight from Troy) by Italian Renaissance painter Federico Barocci (at the Galleria Borghese in Rome), in Aeneas Carrying Anchises (1729) by French painter Charles-André van Loo (at the Louvre, Paris) or in Aeneas Carrying his Father Anchises Followed by Ascanius (after François Girardon) (1715) by French sculptor Pierre Lepautre (at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University).