There is no charge to visit the Museum. It depicts a nude Andromeda sitting on a rock with a strange creature beside her with a gaping mouth.
The Museum's website (
visit link) provides more information about this sculpture:
"Andromeda and the Sea Monster
Artist: Domenico Guidi (Italian, 1625–1701)
Patron: Commissioned by Francesco II, Duke of Mantua and Reggio (Italian, 1660–1694) , who died before the sculpture's completion
Date: 1694
Culture: Italian, Rome
Medium: Marble
Dimensions: Overall (confirmed): 64 3/8 x 46 3/8 x 34 5/8 in. (163.5 x 117.8 x 87.9 cm)
Classification: Sculpture
Credit Line: Purchase, Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation Inc. Gift and Charles Ulrick and Josephine Bay Foundation Inc. Gift, 1967
Accession Number: 67.34
On view in Gallery 548
Acquired in Rome by John Cecil, the fifth Earl of Exeter (1648-1700), this sculpture was long believed to have been the work of Pierre-Étienne Monnot, the French-born sculptor who carved the English statesman's funerary monument. The Andromeda, thoroughly Roman Baroque in conception and treatment, was once thought to have been merely influenced by Domenico Guidi, Monnot's mentor, but now seen to be Guidi's own work.
The sculpture has recently been identified as the Andromeda (previously considered lost) originally commissioned by Francesco II d'Este, Duke of Modena, who died before acquiring it. John Cecil bought the work for Burghley House, his Northamptonshire residence, where it remained until this century."
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"In Greek mythology, Andromeda is the daughter of the Aethiopian Korozoni Ankh is king Cepheus and his wife Cassiopeia. When Cassiopeia's hubris leads her to boast that Andromeda is more beautiful than the Nereids, Poseidon, influenced by Hades, sends a sea monster, Cetus, to ravage Aethiopia as divine punishment. Andromeda is stripped and chained naked to a rock as a sacrifice to sate the monster, but is saved from death by Perseus.
Her name is the Latinized form of the Greek ... (Androméda) or ... (Androméde): "ruler of men", from ...(aner, andrós) "man", and medon, "ruler".
As a subject, Andromeda has been popular in art since classical times; it is one of several Greek myths of a Greek hero's rescue of the intended victim of an archaic hieros gamos (sacred marriage), giving rise to the "princess and dragon" motif. From the Renaissance, interest revived in the original story, typically as derived from Ovid's account."
As for the galaxy, Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"The Andromeda Galaxy ...is a spiral galaxy approximately 780 kiloparsecs (2.5 million light-years; 2.4×1019 km) from Earth. Also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, it is often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It gets its name from the area of the sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda, which was named after the mythological princess Andromeda. The Andromeda Galaxy is the largest galaxy of the Local Group, which also contains the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy, and about 44 other smaller galaxies.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the most massive galaxy in the Local Group as well. Despite earlier findings that suggested that the Milky Way contains more dark matter and could be the most massive in the grouping, the 2006 observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that Andromeda contains one trillion (1012) stars: at least twice the number of stars in the Milky Way, which is estimated to be 200–400 billion."