Focus on Tanagra (Gérôme sculpture) and explain the Gérôme's Tanagra.
As a painter and sculptor, Gérôme had long drawn inspiration from the Classical world. His famous images of gladiator combats, chariot races, slave markets, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and other subjects from ancient Greece and Rome were widely influential.
In his mid-sixties, Gérôme expressed his fascination with the Tanagra figurines, and the ancients who made and owned them, with his 5-foot-high, tinted-marble Tanagra, a female nude personifying the Tyche, or presiding spirit, of the ancient city. Tanagra sits stiffly upright "atop an excavation mound. Numerous figurines have surfaced in the soil. At her feet lie the tools that allude to both the archaeological dig as well as Gérôme's role as sculptor." On the upraised palm of Tanagra’s hand is a figurine of a female Hoop Dancer (Gérôme's own invention, inspired by, but not a copy of, an actual Tanagra figurine). Thus Tanagra depicts a statue holding a statue. The larger statue sits rigidly posed while the smaller is a "twirling figure, who gracefully dips her head into a golden ring clutched in her right hand and cups a golden ball in the other, as her drapery swirls around her.""Inspired by his characteristic desire for both archaeological accuracy and realism, Gérôme delicately tinted the skin, hair, lips, and nipples of his Tanagra, causing a sensation at the Salon of 1890." A contemporary critic suggested that if the sculpture had been "secretly buried for a time, and then publicly excavated as an antique, perhaps with a broken arm, it would have turned the heads of the whole art world, and been declared in its vital characteristics and subtle anatomy a rival to the Milo Venus."
Tyche Tanagra figurines Tanagra figurine Tanagra Salon