Young Centaur

In December 1736 Monsignor Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti, a prelate from Bergamo who was digging at Hadrian's Villa near Tivoli, found this centaur together with an older companion. They became the pride of his collection, and he kept them. Pope Benedict XIV, who was then filling the new museum on the Capitol, seems to have expected a gift that never came, and as long as Benedict reigned Furietti did not receive the cardinal's hat. It came in 1759 from the next pope, Clement XIII. The centaurs stayed in Furietti's rooms in Rome for almost 30 years. After his death his heirs sold them, with a mosaic from the same excavation, and in 1765 Clement XIII gave them to the Capitoline.

This one is young and laughing. A small animal skin hangs from his left arm, he holds a gnarled shepherd's crook in his right hand, a sign of the world of Dionysus, and a pine branch and pan pipes are carved on the support under his belly. Like his companion he is cut from a rare dark grey marble quarried at Cape Tainaron, the southern tip of mainland Greece. The mosaic that came with them, of doves drinking from a bowl, is also in this building.