Diana

The photograph, framed at knee-height, shows a sculpture of Diana between two columns; the sculpture was commissioned by Third Lord Ordynat Roman Potocki and his wife Elżbieta née Radziwiłł from the fashionable French sculptor, Prosper d’Èpinay. The order was made during the modernisation work carried out by the couple in the Łańcut residence, at the turn of the 20th century. The modernisation works also encompassed restoration of the Classicist Gloriette, in the form of a colonnaded exedra, designed by Christian Peter Aigner for Marshal Princess Izabella Lubomirska, née Czartoryska (deceased in 1816). The semicircular exedra in Łańcut, which Aigner erected together with the plasterer Fryderyk Bauman, comprises seven Corinthian columns set on low plinths and topped with entablature decorated with bucranium, rosettas, denticles and a profiled cornice. The Potocki spouses ordered the sculpture of Diana to be placed on the cylindrical plinth; she is shown naked with a crescent in her hair and an arrow in her left hand. The original of the sculpture is nowadays displayed in the Sculpture Gallery. Its copy is standing on the plinth in front of the Gloriette. Aldona Cholewianka-Kruszyńska