Wounded Amazon (Mattei type)

In the 5th century BC the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, on the coast of Asia Minor, received bronze statues of Amazons, the warrior women of Greek myth, made by several of the most famous sculptors of the day. According to the Roman writer Pliny, the artists themselves were asked to judge. Each named his own statue first, so the prize went to the one they all ranked next after their own, the Amazon by Polykleitos. Phidias came second and Kresilas third.

The bronzes are lost. Roman marble copies preserve several distinct Amazon types, and this statue follows the one called the Mattei type, after a version once in the Villa Mattei in Rome. It is the type most often connected with Phidias, although no attribution is secure, and the museum dates only the lost original, to the 5th century BC.

The statue came from the Villa d'Este at Tivoli and reached the Capitoline in 1753 as a gift of Pope Benedict XIV, after which the restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi worked on it. Its present head belongs to another statue. The museum records that the head was fitted after 1775, having stood until then in the Sala delle Colombe of this palace, and the German archaeologist Wolfgang Helbig took it for a copy of a head by Polykleitos.