Leaning Satyr

The travel writer Pausanias tells a story about the sculptor Praxiteles and his lover, the courtesan Phryne. She asked him which of his works was his finest, and he would not say. So she had a servant run in crying that his workshop was on fire. Praxiteles shouted that all his labour was lost if the flames took his Satyr and his Eros. A satyr by Praxiteles stood in Athens on the Street of Tripods, but whether it was this leaning one nobody can say.

The museum attributes the original of this figure to Praxiteles, around 330 BC. The young satyr leans on a gnarled, twisted vine stock, a panther skin across his body. On his other side a chest with a theatre mask on its lid gives the marble extra support.

More than 100 Roman copies of this figure are known, and the Glyptothek has two. This one was carved in the later 2nd or early 3rd century AD. The other, from the 1st century AD, has lost its head and is a little taller and slimmer.