La Bocca della Verità, Marble sculpture in Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, France.
La Bocca della Verità is a marble sculpture by Jules Blanchard, set in the Jardin du Luxembourg and dated 1878. It shows a female figure whose open mouth forms a hollow where visitors slide a hand. The stone is worn smooth around the opening, and the work stands among the garden's statues rather than in a building.
Jules Blanchard's marble La Bocca della Verità dates from 1878, the year given as its inception, and was shown at the Paris Salon of that period before a plaster model was made. The work adapts the antique Roman relief of the same name, transferring a Roman subject into the sculptural programme of the Jardin du Luxembourg.
The sculpture takes its name from the Roman Bocca della Verità, a marble disk in Rome's Santa Maria in Cosmedin where, legend says, a liar's hand would be bitten off. Blanchard's Paris version instead shows a woman's face with parted lips, and passers-by in the Jardin du Luxembourg still slip a hand between them.
The sculpture stands in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in the 6th arrondissement, near the Boulevard Saint-Michel entrance. It is reachable on foot from the Luxembourg RER station and several bus stops. The garden is open daily, and the work can be viewed at any time during opening hours.
The Roman relief it echoes is the Bocca della Verità in Rome, a marble disk set into the portico of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Jules Blanchard's version turns that flat mask into a full female figure, so the Paris work can be touched and entered rather than merely seen.
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