Mercury At Rest, Bronze, XIXth Century, Probably Italian Work.

Bronze (height 21cm, length 20cm, width 12cm) and its blackened wooden pedestal (total: 32cm x 23cmx 15cm). This bronze is probably an Italian production of the 19th century. This type of object was bought during the grand tour, and was notably sold in Naples. This sculpture represents the psychopomp god Mercury or also called Hermes. It is a copy of the bronze sculpture Hermes seated (or Hermes at rest), found at the Villa des Papyrus in Herculaneum in 1758, is kept at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples1. “This statue was probably the most famous work of art discovered in Herculaneum and Pompeii, in the eighteenth century,” observed Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 2 Four large engravings reproduced it, and it had appeared in Le Antichità di Ercolano, 17713. To protect it against Napoleonic depredations, it was packaged in one of the fifty-two cases of antiques and works of art which accompanied the flight of the Bourbons to Palermo from 1798. Martin Robertson (1975 , vol I: 474) classifies it as a Roman copy, made before AD 79, of an original Greek bronze from the late 4th or early 3rd century BC. AD in the tradition of Lysippus, whose name has been invoked in connection with the sculpture since its first reappearance4.