The Genius of Sculpture

The word painted on the drawing board at the bottom of this picture is GENIO. A genius here is the Roman kind, a guardian spirit attached to a thing, in this case to the art of sculpture.

The young man in front, generally taken to be Mehus himself, points out three famous antiquities, a bronze Minerva, Trajan's Column and the lower part of the Farnese Hercules. The small spirit crowned with laurel at his feet is busy drawing them. What is being argued is the standard doctrine of the academies around 1650, that you learn the human figure by copying ancient sculpture from the object itself, again and again.

Mehus painted a companion to this one, The Genius of Painting, and that picture is now in the Prado in Madrid.