| The Arrotino | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Anon. |
| Year | 1st century BC, after Hellenistic original |
| Type | White marble |
| Location | Uffizi,Florence |
TheArrotino (Italian -the "Blade-Sharpener"), or formerly theScythian, thought to be a figure from a group representing theFlaying of Marsyas is a Hellenistic-Roman sculpture (Pergamene school) of a man crouching to sharpen a knife on a whetstone.
The sculpture was likely excavated in the early sixteenth century, since it is recognizable[1] in an inventory made after the death ofAgostino Chigi in 1520 of his villa inTrastevere, which would become theVilla Farnesina. Later the sculpture formed part of the garden of sculptures and antiquities that Paolantonio Soderini inherited from his brother, MonsignorFrancesco Soderini, who had arranged them in theMausoleum of Augustus; Paolantonio noted in a letter of 1561 thatil mio villano— "my peasant"— had gone away,[2] and it is known that a member of the Mignanelli family sold theArrotino to CardinalFerdinando de' Medici.[3] It was removed to theVilla Medici, where it was displayed until it was removed in the eighteenth century to theMedici collections inFlorence.
In the Medici collections thevillano was reinterpreted as aScythian, or divorced of itsgenre associations entirely by becoming a royal barber or butler overhearing treasonous plotting against the state, raising it to the level of moralised history, which ranked higher in the contemporaryhierarchy of genres. Only since the seventeenth century has it been recognized as having formed one part of aHellenistic group of "Apollo flayingMarsyas" (akin to the better-known multiple figures ofLaocoön and His Sons,the Odyssean groups at Sperlonga, or thePergamene group of which theDying Gaul was once a part). The identification with a Marsyas group was introduced in 1669, in a publication byLeonardo Agostini, who recognized the theme in antiqueengraved hardstones.[4]
TheArrotino was also for a long time thought to be an original Greek sculpture, and one of the finest such sculptures to have survived. As such, plaster copies were made for show and for art instruction (one made for theRoyal Academy is now on view at theCourtauld). The original was often displayed beside one of the variants of the other great ancient sculpture of a crouching figure, theCrouching Venus also in the Uffizi collection.[5] However, theArrotino is now recognised simply as a first-century BC copy from aHellenistic original.
It is on display in theTribuna of the Uffizi, alongside Old Master paintings, as it has been since the 18th century.
Media related toArrotino at Wikimedia Commons
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