Click on the image above to enlarge.

The statue depicted on the cover of Bob Dylan’s forthcoming album Tempest was initially misidentified by fans as Bernini’s Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa, which it somewhat resembles.  Details of the faces of the two statues are similar in some ways.  In fact it’s one of the statues around the base of the Athena Fountain in front of the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna.  It’s grouped with another female figure and they represent two of the major rivers of the Austrian empire as once constituted, the Elbe and the Moldau.  (I’m not sure which is which, but Dylan scholar Alan Fraser reports that other Dylan researchers online say the one depicted on Tempest — the one on the right in the above photograph — represents the Moldau.  Reader Wilhelmine advises me that neither river is in Austria proper and that the Moldau flows now only through present-day Czechoslovakia.)

They were carved by Carl Kundmann (above) sometime between 1893 and 1902.  They were clearly intended to echo Baroque sculpture, Bernini’s in particular.  The figure Dylan used very probably resembled Bernini’s Theresa by intention.  It’s a very fine work.