Old Centaur

The old centaur's arms are pulled behind his back, and his head twists sharply over his right shoulder, as if he were straining to see something behind him. What he is looking for is lost. A replica of the same figure in the Louvre, once in the Borghese collection, still has a small winged Eros riding on his back, pulling his head round and tormenting him, and the boy is missing here.

That lost rider explains the pair. The two centaurs were found together at Hadrian's Villa, and they set two ages side by side. The museum describes the younger one with a laughing face and this one with features drawn by the pains of love, an allegory of love at different times of life. A pair of castanets is carved in low relief on the support beneath his body.

The sculptors worked the hard dark marble to look like metal in the hair, the beard and the tail, and both statues are taken for copies of lost bronze originals. The two stand in the middle of the great hall of the Palazzo Nuovo, in a row of statues carved in dark stone.