"The Dying Gaul"

"[A] sculpture which to me is intensely 'mournful and moving' is 'The Dying Gaul,' a Roman marble carving depicting a dying warrior. I saw and touched this piece for the first time in a museum in Rome in April, 2000. It has a facial and physical expression that is powerful and noble, but so evocative of the conscious realization and acceptance of the ultimate inevitable--I never forgot it and still think of it often . . . . And don't get me started on the 'Pieta'!" - Bob Borta

Thanks to the art historian Winckelmann, the Dying Gaul was formerly called a gladiator; but with his moustache and neck torque he is clearly what the Roman historian Diodorus called a “shaggy haired gaul”. The sculpture is a Roman copy of one of the Hellenistic bronze figures erected at Pergamon by King Attalos 1st (241-197 BCE) commemorating his victories. Despite celebrating triumph, the dignified pathos of the defeated “barbarians” is preserved.

The sculpture was a favourite amongst the dilettanti of the neo-classical era, and it often features prominently in paintings of wealthy collectors in front of their repositories of art. Its fame was boosted by the restoration of the right arm, by Michelangelo. In the ebb and flow of the Napoleonic wars the location of the original shifted between Rome and Paris, amid much celebration each time it was moved

Number: 

377

Material: 

Marble

Location of Original: 

Rome, Capitoline Museum, Stanza del Gladiatore 1

Size: 

0.73 x 0.93m

Accession: 

Purchased in 1884 from Brucciani of London

References: 

Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 342 (n.5), pl. 122.3
Stuart-Jones: Catalogue of the Capitoline Museum (1912), 338, no.1
Brunn-Bruckmann: Denkmäler Griechischer und Römischer Skulptur, pl. 421
Walston: Catalogue of Casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889), 101, no.546
Reporter: 19 June 1885, 894, no.494
Pollitt: Art in the Hellenistic Age, 85, pl. 85

Date: 

Roman. Original: c.200 BCE

Provenance: 

From the Villa Ludovisi, Rome

https://museum.classics.cam.ac.uk/collections/casts/dying-gaul