Red Faun

He is dancing. His weight rests on the right leg while the left foot steps forward and turns outward, marking the rhythm, and in his raised right hand he holds a bunch of grapes. His mouth is open in a grin that shows his teeth, and the empty eye sockets probably once held inlays of metal or coloured stone. Fauns like him belonged to the drunken following of Dionysus, god of wine, and this one is carved from rosso antico, a dark red marble quarried in Laconia, in the Peloponnese. The museum reads the choice of colour as one more link to wine.

He was found in 1736 at Hadrian's Villa near Tivoli, the emperor's vast country residence, and the museum dates him to the 2nd century AD, after a Greek original of the late Hellenistic age. The repairs went to the restorers Clemente Bianchi and Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, who filled the losses with a red marble streaked with grey that leaves the ancient figure largely as it was. From 1746, when he entered the Capitoline collections, travellers came to admire him. The room is named after him, and on its walls hangs the bronze tablet with the law by which the Senate conferred power on the emperor Vespasian in 69 AD.