Le Lion et le Serpent

It took the Saumur-based enameller René Lambourg eight years to complete this extraordinary sculpture. Legend has it that in 1811 he was asked by Napoleon himself to reproduce a picture depicting ‘a lion with an enormous snake writhing beneath its claws’. To do so, Lambourg used spun glass (glass thread between 1 and 3/100th of a millimetre in diameter), which when heated becomes flexible enough to be worked like a textile fabric. This thread is produced by winding on a drum at speeds of up to five metres per second. The entire sculpture, including the lion’s fur and the snake’s scales are glass. At the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855, this technical feat was acclaimed by the jury and by visitors who thought they were admiring stuffed animals. It joined the Conservatoire’s collections in 1862.