Ilioneus (Kneeling Son of Niobe)

In 1814 and 1815, while the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe after Napoleon, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria was among the princes gathered in the city. In those months this torso came into his hands. The seller was Joseph Barth, a Viennese eye doctor and collector, who had found it in Prague, by one account in a stonemason's yard, by another in the garden of an inn, and had paid next to nothing for it. Ludwig gave him 6,000 ducats. In Vienna the sculptor Fischer had supplied the missing head and arms in plaster.

The name comes from the Roman poet Ovid. In his Metamorphoses Ilioneus is the youngest of the sons of Niobe, whom Apollo and Artemis shot down to punish their mother's pride. The boy raised his arms and begged the gods to spare him. Apollo was moved, Ovid writes, but the arrow could no longer be called back. That this kneeling youth is Ilioneus is a traditional identification.

The marble is regarded as a Greek original, carved around 300 BC. Fischer's plaster head and arms are no longer there.