Spinning Diana

Guest blogger Matthew Blanchard served remotely as a curatorial intern under the SCMA's Curator of Painting and Sculpture Danielle Carrabino during the summer of 2020. He is a current graduate student at UMass Amherst (MA '21) where his research specialties are Greco-Roman and 19th century European and American art.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana of the Tower (1899) is one of the SCMA’s many treasures of American art. Saint-Gaudens, America’s foremost sculptor of the late 19th century, specialized in sculpting mythological figures from ancient Greece and Rome. This sculpture is one of his most renowned masterpieces. It depicts a nude Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, balancing on one foot as she prepares to fire off an arrow from her bow. In terms of style, Saint-Gaudens was inspired by ancient sculptures of Roman gods and goddesses, but this one is a little different. Unlike his other sculptures, this one has a secret: it moves. A statue is usually a static object, and stands firm in its place, but not this one. When art handlers recently moved the Diana to its new home in the late 19th-century American Art gallery, they discovered this interesting quirk for themselves. The Diana has a knob on its pyramid-shaped base, and when someone turns it, Diana spins around. Her foot, resting on a little sphere, twirls beneath her and her graceful figure spins above. She points her bow and arrow all around, and the goddess is seen from all sides. This is surely a beautiful example of American Neoclassical sculpture, and it shows the amazing talent of Saint-Gaudens as a sculptor, but this little trick makes this already-interesting sculpture even more alluring.

^{Spinning Diana of the Tower}

The question, of course, is why? Why does this statue of Diana spin? The answer lies in the title of this sculpture: Diana of the Tower. “The Tower” refers to a tower of the Madison Square Garden, where the original Diana sculpture was placed. Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to sculpt a statue for the weathervane at the top of the tower to indicate which way the wind was blowing. So, Saint-Gaudens created the Diana of the Tower. Whichever way her bow and arrow pointed, that was the direction of the wind.

The SCMA's version, however, is not installed as a weathervane, and the viewer does not get the same sense of movement. Saint-Gaudens planned for this. He designed this version to spin with the turn of a knob, so his sculpture can be experienced as it was intended. It’s an interesting little story for a wholly unexpected feature of an American masterpiece.