Drunken Old Woman

When King Ludwig I's Glyptothek opened in Munich in 1830, this statue was left out. The architect of the building, Leo von Klenze, refused to admit her, although she was the most important of the few ancient sculptures that the Bavarian rulers had owned before Ludwig began collecting. Her road to Munich had begun in Rome. In 1714 she was sent from there as a gift to Johann Wilhelm, the Elector Palatine, at Düsseldorf, later spent years in Mannheim, and early in the 19th century reached the Residenz, the rulers' palace in Munich.

Even after she came to the Glyptothek she stayed on the margins. From 1865 she stood in the gallery of plaster casts that the archaeologist Heinrich Brunn had set up there. Only in 1895 did his successor Adolf Furtwängler put her on show among the originals, in the Roman gallery rather than with the Greek sculpture.

The museum calls her a Roman copy of a famous Hellenistic original from around 200 BC. The Roman author Pliny mentions a drunken old woman in marble at Smyrna, on the coast of Asia Minor, by a sculptor named Myron, though nothing ties that lost work securely to this figure.