Meleager, mythical hunter

This much-restored statue of the mythical hunter Meleager, a Roman Imperial copy of a Greek original, is representative of a group of characteristic acquisitions by the Berlin Collection of Classical Antiquities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The torso, together with the thighs, the left arm and fragments of the lance and dog, was found in the ruins of an ancient villa near Rome in 1838. Acquired for Berlin in 1841, the missing parts were restored before it left Rome by the German sculptor Emil Wolff. Wolff closely followed an antique statue of the same type in the Vatican, and his additions are of great quality and as close to the lost parts as possible. They were thus retained when the work was again restored in 1995-6. The head, in Parian marble, and the tip of the spear match the original material, while all the other additions, such as the hunting dog shown in the illustration, are in Carrara marble. While working on the statue, Wolff noted that it had already been restored during antiquity, which clearly indicates that it was valued highly by its Roman collector.