Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Tomb of Isocrates, Athenian Orator

Turning to another ancient source—Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators—Lequeu transcribed a description of the rhetorician Isocrates’s tomb and rendered a fantastic vision of its appearance. While the original tomb was surmounted by a column bearing a mermaid, symbolizing Isocrates’s eloquence, a mistranslation of the original Greek led Lequeu to include a sheep as the base.

Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826)
Tomb of Isocrates, Athenian Orator, 1789
Pen and black ink, brown and gray wash
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la photographie