Torso of a Man

Class and production: sculpture / statues

Cultural context: Roman period/ local workshop

Date: Roman Imperial period

Description

This powerful and muscular torso shows a figure resting. Scholars recognise the iconographic schema of Hercules of Copenhagen/Dresda, which was produced from a bronze prototype made by the Polycletus’s school around 360 B.C. It represents Hercules standing with lion skin under his left arm and the cludgel on wich the hero is leaning. M. De Paoli warns about this identification because, also if Hercules’s cult was very spread in the Nort-Eastern Italy during the Roman Age, the piece is fragmented and local workshops often didn’t reproduce exactly the big statuary.

Materials and techniques: white marble, fine-grained/ sculpture

Dimensions: height 18.5 cm, lenght 14 cm

Provenance: Mantova Benavides Collection, Padua; Vallisneri Collection, Padua

University of Padua, Museum of Archaeological Sciences and Art

Cat. Number: MB112

Bibliography

• De Paoli Marcella, 21.Torsetto virile, in Un Museo di Antichità nella Padova del Cinquecento. La raccolta di Marco Mantova Benavides all'Università di Padova, a cura di Irene Favaretto, Alessandra Menegazzi, Roma, Giorgio Bretschneider, 2013, pp. 44-45.