Paris – Sculpture in La Serena

Paris depicts the Trojan prince raised as a shepherd on Mount Ida, also known as Alexander. His figure is associated with the Judgment of Paris: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite contested the prize of beauty, and Zeus appointed the young man to choose between them. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Hera offered him power, Athena victory in war and Aphrodite marriage to Helen. Paris chose Aphrodite; Helen’s departure for Troy became one of the events leading to the Trojan War.

The apple once held by the La Serena sculpture, confirmed in historical photographs, is the attribute of the beauty prize. The Phrygian cap evokes the character’s eastern origin, while his youth and support against a tree trunk present him in his pastoral role. The distal part of the right arm and the hand that carried the apple are now missing; the date of this loss is unknown.

The composition closely relates to the sculpture “The Shepherd Paris about to give the apple that will be the prize of beauty,” made by Nicolas-François Gillet in 1757 and held by the Louvre. The La Serena work is larger and has variations in the support and drapery: it is interpreted as a derivation of that composition, not as a work executed by Gillet himself.

In his 1975 Memoirs, Gabriel González Videla records it as “Páride (Paris), by Bartolini,” with a height of 1.65 metres. He describes it as an original marble purchased in Rome, previously held in the Marquis Giuntini’s palace in Florence, for the Plan Serena collection. The attribution to Lorenzo Bartolini remains a historical record, without corroborated authorship. The local plaque, however, describes it as a seventeenth-century copy of a Greek original; this classification does not agree with the proposed relationship to Gillet. Its execution date remains undetermined.