Bronze Pegasus

Bronze PegasusA print of a Bronze Pegasus the winged horse of Greek mythology, caught mid flight in cast bronze of the kind produced from the classical Greek period through the Renaissance and the Neoclassical revival. Pegasus was born from the blood of the gorgon Medusa at the moment Perseus severed her head immortal, pure white, and winged. He was tamed with a golden bridle given by Athena to the Corinthian hero Bellerophon, who rode him against the Chimera;

after Zeus

The vase was acquired by the Medici family in the 16th century for their Roman villa and moved to Florence in the 18th

His hands are wrapped in caesti

the cap of invisibility

It is a Baroque masterpiece

The figure of a woman personifying the country

The entire figure is carried in a single continuous line — shield

was king of Salamis and

he produced hundreds of watercolours of architecture

was a centaur)

A black and white print of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–1554) — the great bronze that has stood under the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence's Piazza della Signoria for nearly five hundred years

The engraved vases in Teyler's series sit in a long European tradition of ornamental printmaking after antique marble — a tradition that reached its fullest expression in the monumental plates of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) a century later