The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun

Nobody knows for certain who carved this little group, and that is the most interesting thing about it. It was in Cardinal Scipione Borghese's collection by 1615, when a craftsman was paid for its base, yet a guide to the villa in 1650 listed it with no author's name. In 1675 the German writer Joachim von Sandrart said it was by Bernini, which would make it the work of a teenager. The idea was taken up in 1926 by the art historian Roberto Longhi, and many scholars, Irving Lavin among them, have treated it as one of Bernini's earliest pieces. Then in 2022 Anna Coliva, a former director of the Galleria Borghese, catalogued it under an unknown author, arguing that it does not fit Bernini's documented early work. Others still hold to the old name, and the museum lists it as attributed to him. The scene is from myth. The baby Jupiter, hidden from his father, feeds from the goat Amalthea, while a young faun, identified as Pan, drinks her milk from a bowl.