Essay - The Object

14 October 2010

Sir John Soane Museum

My Object:

It’s a sculpture of a human figure, in my opinion a woman, roughly about 1m in hight. The width changes when looking from the front of the sculpture, getting wider from the feet to where the elbows touch her body, that being the widest point, from there it gets smaller again to the top of the crown she’s wearing. The eyes of the sculpture are staring openly into the distance. The face, neck, hands and a part of the feet are black, probably made from a very hard type of black stone or black marble. The rest of the sculpture is made from white marble with signs of slight aging.

The white marble part of the sculpture suggests a dress that is draped over her body, it covers the figure from neck to feet, her arms are covered until just after the elbow. The back of the sculpture or the back of the dress, has some folds that suggest a type of soft fabric as it is very smooth overall. The crown that she's wearing on her head, has a round shape like most crowns have and resembles closely the crown on the queen chess piece.

A veil is attached to the crown that rests on her shoulders, between the veil and the head are 6 miniature animals, 3 either side of her head. These animal shaped miniatures are about 3cm tall and protrude from the sculpture, they look like the gargoyles from the Notre Dame cathedral and make the shape of her veil look like a pair of wings resembling Dumbo the flying elephant.

Below the neck and around the chest area of the sculpture there is an oval shaped plate with an embossing of a crest on it. The crest itself is made up of several figures and the top of the plate on which it is embossed intersects the neck line of the dress by roughly one third. The boarder of the oval plate is made up of small beads that get bigger from top to the bottom. At the top of the crest, near the border with the neck, there are two lions leaping, one on the left and one on the right, their faces are pointed toward each other. Below this there are two human figures, their faces also point towards each other. In-between them there is a wreath which they are both holding, below that we see the last figure, a crab, viewed from the top.

Looking at the arms of the statue, we can see that they are held by her side. They are bent at the elbow so that the forearm is pointing forwards. There are two miniature lion figures standing up straight on each forearm. The heads of the lions are facing the same direction as the statue. Back to the torso we see that below the crest there are oval rivets coming out of the marble hanging in 4 rows under each other. The top row has the biggest rivets following the border of the necklace, the rest of them go halfway around her waist and get smaller with every row.

We are now at the suggested hips of this sculpture, another pattern of the dress starts here that ends near her ankles. There are 23 images in 5 vertical rows that protrude slightly. Almost all of them look like animals or mystical creatures and I'm not a 100% sure if I identify them correctly. The middle row is unique, the ones left and right from the middle are mirrored. To start at the top of the row in the middle we see 3 animals that look like deer, on the 2nd row from the top there are 3 monkeys, below that 2 roe deer, then 1 kangaroo below that 1 eagle and on the last row 1 antelope. Starting at the top on the 2^nd vertical row we see a woman with big wings coming from her shoulders. Below that an oversized insect that has wings like a moth, a flower form follows and the insect and the flower form repeat after each other until the bottom of the dress. The 3^rd lane from the middle starts with a deer, followed by a monkey, then by an aries, the 4th and 5th are too damaged to see what it could be, the 6th is the flower shape again. The very last bit of the dress is pleated till halfway her feet.