This Herakles was one of the famous discoveries of the wealthy aristocrats who undertook the Grand Tour of Italy in the eighteenth century, and was quickly bought by Lord Lansdowne for his house in London.
Its missing left arm was reinstated by a leading restorer, Carlo Albacini, so as to lean a club on his left shoulder. These restorations were in turn replaced in 1976, after this cast was made.
The Roman copy is of a Greek original ascribed to the school of Skopas, with its characteristic deep set eyes and small head
Malibu, Getty Museum
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 251 (n.6), pl. 91.1
Richter: Sculpture & Sculptors of the Greeks (1950), 180 & 276, fig.707
Lawrence: Classical Sculpture (1928), 257
Lawrence: Later Greek Sculpture (1927), pl. 4a
Vaughan in Journal of the History of Collections, vol.3, no.2 (1991), 193-5
J Paul Getty Museum: Handbook of the Antiquities Collection, 160
Found in 1791 in Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli. From 1792 in Lansdowne House, London. To Malibu in 1951
