Apotheosis of Prince Eugene of Savoy

In August 1717 Prince Eugene of Savoy took Belgrade from the Ottoman army, and in July 1718 the Peace of Passarowitz confirmed what the war had won. In the same years the prince was building the Upper Belvedere, the grander of his two palaces on the edge of Vienna. This marble group was begun around 1718, and that war sits at its foot, in the figure of a Turkish captive.

Above the captive, Eugene appears as a second Hercules, with lion skin and club, beside a figure of Fame and her trumpet. Look at his left hand. The museum reads the gesture as modesty: the prince is covering the mouth of Fame's trumpet. A small genius points to a sun circled by a serpent, a sign for the endless brilliance of his deeds.

From 1836 the group stood in the Sala terrena, the ground-floor hall of the Upper Belvedere, as a pair to Georg Raphael Donner's marble of Emperor Charles VI, the ruler Eugene had served.