The young Centaur

Located in the center of the room, the two statues were found in Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli during Cardinal Furietti's excavation. In 1765, Clement XIII acquired the statues for the Capitoline Museum. Aristeas and Papias, artits from Aphrodisias, a city in Asia Minor, signed the sculptures, made of bigio morato marble. Aphrodisias had a schoolf of skillful copyists of Greek works. In the last decades of the first century AD, some of these artists moved to Rome, where the munificence of the emperors and private citizens provided continual, well-rewarded work. These statues are very famous due the great skill and the rarity of the material, a prized marble extracted from the quarries on the promontory of Cape Tenaros in Lakonia. The young centaur is happy and joyful.