2025-2026

Oil on anodised aluminium

200 x 150mm

This painting depicts a tiny sculpture, executed in the unglazed porcelain known as ‘biscuit’ or bisque, in the house-museum of Palazzo Mirto in Palermo. Not a copy, precisely, but an evocation of Myron’s fifth-century BCE Discobolus.

Works of this sort, though expertly hand-made and often visually sumptuous, were essentially mass-produced items over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Serving as knickknacks to decorate mantels and dressing tables, they were the anonymous products of factory-firms all over Europe; many have duly arrived to us with scarce record of their origin or authorship, leaving them just as they appear at Palazzo Mirto: confined to museum cabinets and tabletops alongside crystal and crockery, largely ignored. The fate of this tiny bisque sculpture, for all the skill that created it, reflects the destiny of much art in an era of easy reproducibility: the Discobolus, once a landmark in the history of art, has been reduced to a trivial thing.