This work, located in the Louvre, depicts the goddess Diana with a doe. She reaches for an arrow in her quiver with her right hand.
Wikipedia (
visit link) has a photo of this sculpture (under her Greek name, Artemis) and adds:
"Artemis was one of the most widely venerated of the Ancient Greek deities. Her Roman equivalent is Diana. Some scholars believe that the name, and indeed the goddess herself, was originally pre-Greek. Homer refers to her as Artemis Agrotera, Potnia Theron: "Artemis of the wildland, Mistress of Animals". The Arcadians believed she was the daughter of Demeter.
In the classical period of Greek mythology, Artemis (Ancient Greek: ??teµ??) was often described as the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and the twin sister of Apollo. She was the Hellenic goddess of the hunt, wild animals, wilderness, childbirth, virginity and protector of young girls, bringing and relieving disease in women; she often was depicted as a huntress carrying a bow and arrows. The deer and the cypress were sacred to her. In later Hellenistic times, she even assumed the ancient role of Eileithyia in aiding childbirth."
And the Louvre's own website (
visit link) informs us:
"This work was a gift from Pope Paul IV to the French king Henri II, and one of the first ancient statues to arrive in France. The goddess - Diana to the Romans, Artemis to the Greeks -was Apollo's twin sister. The goddess of chastity, and a tireless hunter whose arrows could punish the misdeeds of men, she is depicted here accompanied by a deer. The statue is based on a fourth-century BC Greek bronze attributed to Leochares.
The modern history of the work
A gift from Pope Paul IV to Henri II (1556), this celebrated statue adorned a number of French royal residences. In the sixteenth century, it featured in the Jardin de la Reine at the palace of Fontainebleau. In 1602, Henri IV moved it to the Louvre, where it was displayed in the Hall of Antiquities (now the Salle des Caryatides). Under the reign of Louis XIV, it was sent to the palace of Versailles, where it was shown in the Grande Galerie. In 1798, the statue returned to the Louvre, by order of the Convention. It has been copied, cast and imitated many times in modern Europe, in engravings, ceramics and small bronzes.
A Classical work from the fourth century BC
Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting and twin sister to Apollo, is shown here in action, with her tunic (the chiton) tucked up to her knees to make it easier to pursue her quarry. A cape (the himation) passing over her left shoulder, clings closely to her form. The rhythmic, Classical yet naturalistic draperies, and the goddess's rather aloof majesty, allow us to date the original statue - now lost - to the second Classical period of the fourth century BC.
A copy of an original statue by Leochares
It is tempting to date the Greek model for the statue more precisely, by attributing it to the great fourth-century BC master Leochares, a celebrated Athenian sculptor, whose work is known to us only through ancient literary and epigraphic sources. This hypothesis is based on the striking similarities between the Diana of Versailles and the famous Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican."
As for the asteroid, Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"78 Diana ...is a large and dark main-belt asteroid. Its composition is carbonaceous and primitive. It was discovered by Robert Luther on March 15, 1863, and named after Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt. 78 Diana occulted a star on September 4, 1980. A diameter of 116 km was measured, closely matching the value given by the IRAS satellite.
Photometric observations of this asteroid during 1986 and 2006–08 gave a light curve with a period of 7.2991 hours and a brightness variation in the range 0.02–0.104 magnitude.Based upon radar data, the near surface solid density of the asteroid is 2.7+0.8
-0.5 g cm–3."