A BRONZE BUST OF A CENTAUR

The antique prototype for this bust is the Hadrianic marble of The Centaur with Cupid in the Museé du Louvre, Paris, itself a copy of a lost Greek original from the 2nd century BC. The Hadrianic marble is documented as having been in the Borghese collection by 1613 (Haskell and Penny, loc. cit.) and by 1650 in the Villa Borghese in a room which was named after it. It remained there until 1807 when Napoleon Bonaparte, whose sister had married Prince Camillo Borghese, famously purchased the Borghese antiquities. As a result of that sale, the marble still remains in the Louvre; however, before its departure from the Villa Borghese it would have been on display along with the Hermaphrodite, the Faun and the Apollo and Daphne, all of which would have been studied by sculptors and painters alike, and all of which would have influenced the reproductions made to feed the Grand Tourist's desire to own replicas of their favourite antiquities.