Statue of Meleager
1st-2nd century
- Medium
- Marble
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Dimensions
- 173 × 73.7 × 55.2 cm (68 5/16 × 29 × 21 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- Roman Empire
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium
- Credit line
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene A. Davidson
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The statue depicts the legendary Greek hunter Meleager, who earned his fame by killing a ferocious boar that terrorized the people of Calydon. About forty Roman sculptural representations of Meleager survive, leading scholars to conclude that there was likely an earlier Greek statue on which they are based, presumably by the architect and sculptor Skopas of Paros, who incorporated a marble relief depicting the Calydonian boar hunt on one of his buildings. However, none of the ancient authors who wrote about Greek sculpture mention that Skopas created a large-scale, three-dimensional statue of Meleager, so the attribution to him is uncertain.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
