Arrotino

Sculpture


title = The Arrotino
artist = Anon.
year = 1st century BC,
after Hellenistic original
type = White marble
height =
inch =
city = Florence
museum = Uffizi The "Arrotino" (Italian - the blade-sharpener), the "Scythian", the "knife-sharpener", or the "Apollo and Marsyas" is a Hellenistic-Roman sculpture (Pergamene school) of a man crouching to sharpen a knife on a whetstone.

The sculpture was excavated in the early sixteenth century, for it is recognizable ["uno Augure di marmore, sta a ginocchi piegati et sega un saxo" "an Augure of marble, crouching on his knees and strokes a [whet] stone"] in an inventory made after the death of Agostino Chigi (1520) of his villa in Trastevere, which would become the Villa Farnesina. Later the sculpture formed part of the garden of sculptures and antiquities that Paolantonio Soderini inherited from his brother, Monsignor Francesco Cardinal Soderini, who had arranged them in the Mausoleum of Augustus; Paolantonio noted in a letter of 1561 that "il mio villano"— "my peasant"— had gone away, [Identified by Alessandro Parronchi, "L'Arrotino opera moderna" "Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore" (1971) pp 345-74, noted by Riccomini 1995:281, note 62.] and it is known that a member of the Mignanelli family sold the "Arrotino" to Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici. [Anna Maria Riccomini, "A Garden of Statues and Marbles: The Soderini Collection in the Mausoleum of Augustus" "Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes" 58 (1995, pp. 265-284) p. 281f.] It was removed to the Villa Medici, where it was displayed until it was removed in the eighteenth century to the Medici collections in Florence.

In the Medici collections the "villano" was reinterpeted as a Scythian, or divorced of its "genre" associations entirely by becoming a royal barber or butler overhearing treasonous plotting against the state, raising it to the level of moralised history. It is now thought to have been one part of a Hellenistic group of "Apollo flaying Marsyas" (akin to the better-known "Laocoön and his Sons", the Odyssean groups at Sperlonga, or the Pergamene group of which the "Dying Gaul" was a part). It 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 the Royal Academy is now on view at the Courtauld). The original was often displayed beside one of the variants of the other great ancient sculpture of a crouching figure, the "Crouching Venus" also in the Uffizi collection. [The two sculptures were paired in this fashion in the Parterre du Nord at Versailles, clearly visible in Étienne Allegrain's panoramic "Promenade of Louis XIV in the Parterre du Nord" 1688.] However, the "Arrotino" is now recognised simply as a first century BC copy from a Hellenistic original.

It is on display in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, alongside Old Master paintings, as it has been since the 18th century.

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