Nymph of Fontainebleau

The first surviving monumental piece by Cellini is this bronze lunette for the Porte Dor�e at Fontainebleau. The relief, the only extant part of his portal decoration, illustrates a variant of the legend of Fontainebleau (a hunting dog discovered a spring and its goddess in the forest) from a lost fresco by Rosso. A nymph reclines like a Classical river god - her arm round the stag with a three-dimensional head - flanked by hunting dogs and boars. Her large form, against a foil of intricate details, demonstrates that articulating the body on a large scale was not Cellini’s forte.