Drunken Old Woman

In the generations after Alexander the Great, Greek sculptors turned more and more to people earlier art had seldom shown, children and peasants, the old and the worn. This woman sits on the ground with her knees drawn up, clasping a large wine flask decorated with ivy, her lined face tilted upward and her mouth open. The museum calls the statue a copy of a Hellenistic original, and its room text places that original probably in the 3rd century BC.

The flask is a lagynos. That kind of jar gave its name to the Lagynophoria, a festival founded in Alexandria by King Ptolemy IV of Egypt, at which each guest drank from a flask he had brought himself, and for that reason some scholars place the original in Alexandria. Others see the figure as an offering to Dionysos, the god of wine, whose plant was ivy. Who she was meant to be, a nurse or perhaps an ageing courtesan, is still debated.

This copy was found in 1620 near the church of Sant'Agnese on the Via Nomentana, and it passed through the collections of two Roman families, the Verospi and then the Ottoboni, before reaching the Capitol. The other well-known Roman copy of the figure is in the Glyptothek in Munich.