Resumen de La Pythie de Marcello: corps, empreinte, matrice
The sculptor Marcello molded her masterpiece Pythie (1870) on her own body. Marcello, the pseudonym for Adèle d'Affy, the Duchess Colonna, was one of the most popular female sculptors during the Second Empire. In a letter to her mother dated July 13, 1869, Marcello wrote that the arms, shoulders, legs, and bare breasts of the figure were molded on her own body. She described her feelings during this process as “maternal devotedness, the operation having nothing enjoyable about it.” The writer goes on to discuss, in anthropological and artistic terms, what is at stake in Marcello's maternal relation to her sculptures.
