Nessus Abducting Deianira

Thorvaldsen’s severe style, informed by careful study of antiquity, shows to best advantaged in his reliefs. His preeminence in this field won him the sobriquet “patriarch of the relief.”

Nessus Abducting Deianira, the mythological subject of a centaur abducting Hercules’s wife, Deianira, while ferrying her across the river, is one of the artist’s largest compositions. With its erotic and violent undertones, the subject was popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods but infrequently depicted during the soberer era about 1800. The starting point for Thorvaldsen’s composition was an antique Roman marble relief known to the sculptor through a book.

The original plaster model of the relief was made c. 1814. Three marble versions were carved between 1821 and 1826. The plaster model and two marble version are in Denmark (Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen, and private collection).