Infant Hercules, by Julien Dillens (archival quality)

Inspired by Cosmo Wenman, who recently wrote the following on Medium:

"It’s an inversion of the goal of creating access to a physical space. It’s taking a collection and projecting it outward so that people outside the museum can access the designs directly, wherever they happen to be.

What I’m advocating is not anticipating particular installations, particular uses, or particular audiences. It’s dumping the data online so that the users outside the museum can use it in ways that we could never anticipate or plan for."

This is a work of mysterious origin. Here is a transcript of what the seller told me--it's my favorite story of how an object like this ends up on eBay: "I found this statue about 35/40 years ago in a house that I was emptying for renovation/restoration. I kept this statue for myself, it was all this time a decorative piece on a chest in my house. And now, because none of my children are interested in it, I decided to sell it."

All I know is that the artist is the sculptor Julien Dillens [1849-1904]. There does not appear to be any record of this work, so I can only guess that the subject is an infant Hercules. Possibly he made it for his own amusement, as it is thoroughly strange and completely unlike the works he made for public monuments!

Creator: Julien Dillens [1849-1904]
Date: 1880s
Dimensions: 18 x 5 x 5 inches
Material: Terra cotta
Weight: ~7 lbs
Date Acquired: 2014-03-25
From Where?: Lommel, Limburg (Belgium)

A very special thanks to Sean O'Reilly and 3D Printsmith LLC for making this all possible. He used a calibrated structured light scanner and mapped numerous close-up shots to a macro view of the statuette.

Thank you all for downloading! I hope you enjoy it and look at it closely, it really rewards you with a wealth of detail the more you study it!

Stephen Chow
chowcollection.culturalspot.org

Direct link to the original entry here.

P.S. Let me know if you print this! I'd love to see the results. My e-mail is: [email protected]