Two figures parting.
The identities of this pair perplexed antiquarians throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having been given at least thirteen different names, from Penelope to Marcus Aurelius. After settling on Orestes and Elektra, interest in the sculpture and its identity waned during the later nineteenth century; it was now seen as affected and sentimental in the light of the new Archaic and High Classical discoveries then being made in Greece.
The sculptor Menelaos was a Greek born in southern Italy and working in Rome
Rome, National Museum (Terme) 171
Purchased from Malpieri of Rome in 1884
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 386 (n.14), pl. 135.4
Paribeni: Catalogue of Greek Sculpture of the 5th Century BC in the National Museum (Terme), Rome (1953), 116
Brunn-Bruckmann: Denkmäler Griechischer und Römischer Skulptur, 309
Arndt & Amelung: Photografische Einzelaufnahmen Antiker Skulpturen, 256-61
Walston: Catalogue of Casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889), 111, no.583
Reporter: 19 June 1885, 894, no.511
Pollitt: Art in the Hellenistic Age, 175, pl. 154
Richter: Ancient Italy, 115
Strong: Art in Ancient Rome I, 102
[Not on the cast]: Menelaos pupil of Stephanos made (this)
From Rome
