The Nymph and Love

Gabriel Guerra is one of the sculptors who best typified the National Fine Arts School in the last third of the XlXth century. The works that he produced as an art student, and those commissioned from him later on, such as the decorative groups located on Reforma Avenue in México City, reflect the gamut of thematic changes and technical advances -ranging from the classical compositional sobriety of the first half of the century to the sensuality and lightness of fin-de-siècle "Modernist" sculpture. This sculptural group, under the title The Nymph and Love, was shown at the XVIIIth Exhibition of the San Carlos Academy in 1877, winning first prize in its class. Since that time, other tides, such as Venus and Love and A Mockery of Love, have been assigned to the piece, all of them alluding to certain characters from Greco-Roman mythology -namely, the beautiful Diana-Venus, the Goddess of Love, and her son, Eros-Cupid, a mischievous little being who shoots arrows into his mortal victims to make them fall in love. The work –whose anatomical perfection bears witness to the figure- drawing classes with live models in which the artist took part- depicts the goddess seated on a log, with her right hand placed, with motherly tenderness, over the forehead and eyes of the child whose bowed head triggers the dynamic curve of his infant figure, while, with her left hand, she has just taken away the lethal arrows which are the cause of so much bliss, torment and passion. This work is the artist´s rendering of the incident from classical mythology in which Venus punishes her son after having been pierced by one of his arrows and falling madly in love with Adonis. The link between this sculpture and the painting from the same period by Manuel Ocaranza, entitled Pranks of Love, is evident. It entered the MUNAL, as part of the latter's founding endowment, in 1982.