Mélodie

What you are looking at

A young woman strides forward with a long transverse flute held across her body, one hand at each end, as if she has just lowered it from her lips. A wind from behind lifts her long hair into a single mass that streams past her shoulders. Her dress, cut low off the shoulders and gathered under the breast, is pressed against her body by the same wind, so that the legs and torso show through a web of fine, rippling folds. She looks away to her left, alert and composed.

The photograph shows the bronze in a foundry or studio, surrounded by racks, tools and other casts, before installation. That setting makes one of the work's tricks easy to read: the skin is left a warm golden bronze, while the dress has been given a pale, chalky patina, so that cloth and body seem to be made of different materials even though both are cast metal.

How it was made

Luo Li Rong (born 1980 in Hunan province, China) trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, graduating in 2005, and moved to Europe soon after, living in Belgium from 2006 to 2017. In 2018 she opened her own foundry in Bologna, Italy. Her sculptures are modeled in clay at full scale and cast in bronze by the lost-wax method, then finished with layered patinas.

Mélodie is listed by galleries at 208 × 85 × 100 cm, in a numbered edition limited to eight casts. The date is given here as 2020; Luo's catalogue also includes a closely related large bronze, La mélodie oubliée (The Forgotten Melody), recorded as 2017 and 205 cm high, so sources sometimes mix the two titles.

Close looking

The drapery is the real subject. Luo models the dress as hundreds of narrow ridges that run diagonally from the shoulder to the hem, each one picked out in the pale patina and shaded in the troughs with bronze. It reads at once as wet, windblown and transparent, a modern version of the "wet drapery" style of classical Greek sculpture, where cloth clings to the figure beneath. Look at the hem at the lower right: it breaks into loose, flying edges, the most open and difficult part of the casting.

The flute is a quieter detail. It is plain and straight, with its finger holes carefully marked, and it gives the composition a strong horizontal against all the swirling vertical lines of hair and fabric. The title, Mélodie, turns that instrument into the theme: the wind that moves the figure is also, by implication, the music.

Meaning and tradition

Luo's subject across her career is the idealized female figure in motion, rendered with academic precision and a strong sense of theater. Her work belongs to a long line running from Hellenistic sculpture through nineteenth-century academic bronzes, and it shares with them a frank pleasure in the body seen through fabric. Music has a long history in that tradition as a personification: the woman with an instrument is often less a portrait than an image of harmony itself.

For other works in the catalogue that pair the figure with drapery and movement, see West Wind by Thomas Ridgeway Gould, Berenice's Tresses by Ambrogio Borghi and La Pudicizia by Antonio Corradini. More of the artist's work is on her artist page.

Where to see it

As an edition of eight, Mélodie exists in several casts, held privately or offered through galleries; there is no single museum location.