The Bronze Menagerie

No eminent Victorian's mantelpiece was complete without its little bronze animal, but even before Swedish modern had come along to sweep the house clean of dust catchers, such sentimental statuary had already wound up in the flea market. Most of it was indeed cloying bric-a-brac, but not all. Certain early 19th century French artists, quite logically called les animaliers, made small sculptures, of fauna filled with direct, vibrant naturalism.

With the blessings of Jean Jacques Rousseau's atavistic philosophy, les animaliers abandoned the Greek and Renaissance art, which idealized man, and started ennobling the beasts. Previously, animal sculptors had showed animals as they had seen them, stilled by captivity. These new sculptors--now on view at Manhattan's Bernard Black Gallery--set their beasts in the great outdoors, with sinews rippling and manes ruffling. The bronze beasts battled for their lives on their tiny pedestals: bears brawling, a panther slaying a stag, a lion crushing a serpent, a jaguar gnawing at an alligator, an elephant charging.

Foremost among the animal sculptors was Antoine-Louis Barye, a man who never traveled farther from Paris than the tranquil cow country of nearby Barbizon. A student of the early romantic painter, Baron Gros, he was an apprentice metal chaser at 14, and later a goldsmith. He went to museums and libraries to study stuffed animals and see pictures of them in their natural habitats, visited zoos to watch them in motion, measured their anatomies after they had died. So vividly did Barye give life to his tiny bronzes that his contemporary, the painter Delacroix, once said of him: "I wish I could put a twist in a tiger's tail like that man." Rodin, 44 years younger, claimed Barye as his teacher and artistic father.

Drawing on sound anatomical knowledge, Barye built his clay models up from the skeleton. Though his sculptures are on a tabletop scale, they make picturesque heroes out of wild animals, emphasizing their surging power and proud cruelty in a way that artists have never truly bothered to portray since. Other notable animaliers included Christophe Fratin, son of a taxidermist, and Rosa Bonheur, who later mistakenly gave up sculpture for painting.

Eventually Barye got a sinecure as professor of animal drawing at the Paris zoological museum. Until his death in 1875, he maintained his own foundry. He filed down his casts to hair-fine detail, worked his own warm greenish-brown patina into their glittery pelts. After Barye's death, a wholesale Paris founder named Barbedienne began casting Barye's sculptures by droves with the help of a new reproducing machine that the founder claimed "did for sculpture what Gutenberg had long before done for the written thought." The machine triumphed: cheap copies of the work of les animaliers became as plentiful as paperweights. In the exuberance of mass-produced craft, Barye's exuberance for the noble beast got lost.

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