The bodily dialogue between the desired young man and the besotted artist forms, one might argue, the pedestal upon which the first Ancient Greek sculpture stands. The decedents of these archaic Kouroi, and of the Hellenic cult of youth more generally, people the paintings of Michelangelo and Caravaggio, the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine. Their memory structures the sickly, pallid narrative of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and echoes forward still. In western art, the first gaze is one of desire - however complicatedly and, at times troublingly - from man to male youth.

Nothing could be further from the art of Maillol. The French sculptor's work hails from an entirely separate tradition in the history of art - exclusively, perhaps even obsessively, he created sculpture of women. As such, his works would, to the Greeks, be seen in a different sense entirely to the Kouros; women in stone, or bronze, were goddesses to be feared, and a towering statue of Athena was indistinguishable from the deity herself, with the same withering stare.

This is not to say that artworks depicting women were never produced, nor viewed, with an amorous sensibility. The Venus vulgaris in all her forms was an object of arousal, and yet those who pursued that lust were seen at best as faintly ridiculous, at worst dangerously sacrilegious - take, as an example, the man who attempted carnal relations with the Aphrodite of Knidos, only to throw himself off a cliff in shame once the pink mists of his desire receded.

So, what happens when this Frenchman, whom we might today (excusing anachronism) call "painfully straight", gets in the way of the adoring stare of a certain Anglo-German diplomat, the writer and general aesthete Harry Clemens Ulrich, Graf [Count] von Kessler?

In a fraught web of glances, the poetess watches the woman she desires speak  to a man, and is impressed by his composure in her presence, seemingly immune to her charms. By contrast, Sappho herself is shattered by her love, collapsing into her failing senses, in extremis.

By commissioning a heterosexual sculptor to recreate the image of Colin in bronze, Kessler engineers the same matrix of looking and wanting. Interposing an unmoved third party between himself and male beauty, he complicates what is often too straightforward, and so soon finished.

The creative act becomes a deviation and prolongation of the amorous impulse, somewhere between voyeurism, cuckoldry, and the mediation of social anxiety. With the bulwark of Maillol's straightness placed between them, Kessler could peep through the cracks and watch Colin; protected by the barrier of a third person, he, like Sappho, is given the space to melt entirely in his desire.