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In 1868 Préault executed two plaster models, Jupiter and the Sphinx, and Venus and the Sphinx, which were accepted as the basis for stone statues to ornament the garden of an imperial residence at the Palais de Fontainebleau.
French Mannerist art may have guided Préault's approach, but a drawing he made earlier in Rome shows that it was Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling that directly inspired the pose of Venus here. Jupiter's features are borrowed from an ancient statue of Mausolus carved for that ruler's tomb at Halicarnassus.
In placing the figures of deities on the backs of fabled creatures, Préault was following antique and Renaissance precedents - like other late nineteenth-century artists - but his manner of doing so broke all rules. The figures' poses are tense and awkward, and their musculature exaggerated.
The Franco-Prussian War intervened, and the stone versions were not carved and installed until 1872.
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