What appeals to me about them is their solidity and strength. The garden is on my regular walk along the old train line, the Coulée Verte, and so I pass them frequently. In the Jardin de Reuilly - Paul-Pernin there are three statues of women, carved in stone by three different sculptors. Created at a time when Europeans were fully focused on dominating nature (and the planet), the mother bear in the statue perhaps symbolizes the Earth fighting back against humanity’s assault. The statue captures the final moment of their deadly dance. She won't survive, but she seems to have enough fury left in her to kill him before she dies. Then you notice the knife in her neck, and the dead bear cub dangling from the hunter’s belt. Le Dénicheur d’Oursons, “The Bear Hunter,” Jardin des Plantes, 1886, by Emmanuel FrémietĪt first glance, it seems shockingly erotic: the way the bear clasps the hunter tight, how his leg is twined around hers. The Le Dénicheur d’Oursons, or The Bear Hunter, in my loose translation, stands in a little side garden of Paris’s Grand Jardin des Plantes: Our N ymphe allongé is not lying down relaxing she's exhausted from an eternity of emptying her water pot! The statue suddenly becomes a metphor for all the the thankless, unpaid, repetititve work that women have performed all round the world for millenia. And so, like Sisyphus rolling his rock up a hill, the Danaïdes were condemned to repeat a pointless task forever. The nymphs’ crime? On their father’s orders, they killed their husbands on their wedding night. The 50 Danaïdes - the daughters of king Danaid - were sentenced to an eternity of carrying water vases and pouring them into a basin with holes that would never fill. But, why on earth would one pour water into a fountain? This detail is a clue to the Greek myth I think the statue embodies: That seems right, as you can see water pouring out of the vase’s mouth. I finally found a description of it as a vase she’s upending into the fountain’s pool. I was puzzled at first by the object the nymph is holding in her arms. The fracture lines on her neck indicate she lost her head sometime since her creation in 1924. Because she’s tucked into a niche under the stairway that leads to the ampitheatre, many people walk right past without even noticing she is there.Ī nymph in Classical mythology is a nature spirit.
#Easy target journey to the savage planet Patch
A statue of a woman, entitled Nymphe allongée, reclines at the center of the Fontaine du square des Arènes de Lutèce in a patch of garden between a children’s playground and Paris’ ancient Roman Ampitheatre. Tell me, my friends, what do each of them evoke in you? I thought of the many other statues I’ve seen in Paris gardens, and I wanted to share my favorites with you. Even if I don’t know their precise mythology, I know that there is a story and a meaning embedded in each of them, and I become curious. As a result of this intense journey, I feel such an attuned familiarity when I encounter naked statues. When civilization clothes us humans, it conceals our animal nature - and also our divinity. Gods and goddesses were depicted as naked because that was their natural state as immortal beings.
Goddess statues featured in Tim’s book, Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the GoddessĪmong other things, I came to understand that in ancient times, nakedness was a symbol of sacredness.
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