For most New Yorkers today, the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) means the gilded bronze equestrian monument to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street: Victory, crowned with laurel and clutching a palm frond, strides ahead of the bearded general, with his fierce gaze and windblown cape, erect on his snorting horse. A century ago, Saint-Gaudens would have also been widely known for his Diana—a tall, athletic nude, stepping forward as she releases an arrow from her bow—a landmark sculpture that once dominated the New York skyline from the tower of the original Madison Square Garden. (Removed when the building was razed in 1925, Diana is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In 1908, not long after the sculptor's death, the Metropolitan Museum installed a memorial exhibition of 154 of Saint-Gaudens's works in the Great Hall—what was then the Sculpture Court. Now we can broaden our acquaintance with the artist at the far more modest "Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," a finely tuned exhibition, on view through Nov. 15, that showcases the Met's considerable holdings of the sculptor's works and provides a context for his celebrated monuments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bronze cast of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, 1910. That the Sherman Monument largely defines Saint-Gaudens for many of us is entirely appropriate. The sculpture exemplifies his distinctive refined, vigorous style, a synthesis of acutely observed naturalism and classical idealism, informed by the legacy of the Renaissance. The Sherman Monument shares the assured forms and the tense equilibrium between powerful warhorse and powerful rider first announced by those quintessential mounted warriors of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata, in Padua, and Verrocchio's Colleoni, in Venice. There are even echoes of the iconic Roman bronze that inspired both Donatello and Verrocchio, the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, once the centerpiece of the Campidoglio, in Rome.


Verrocchio's Colleoni



















Donatello's Gattamelata