Meleager of Skopas

The Meleager of Skopas is a lost bronze sculpture of the Greek hero Meleager – host of the Calydonian boar hunt – that is associated in modern times with the fourth century BCE architect and sculptor Skopas of Paros. The sculpture escaped mention in any classical writer. It is judged to have been a late work in the sculptor's career, but it is known only through a number of copies that vary in quality and in fidelity to the original, which show it to have been one of the famous sculptures of antiquity: "the popularity of the Meleager during Roman times was certainly great," notes Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, who reports Andrew F. Stewart's count of 13 statues, 4 torsos, 19 heads (which are similar enough to the Ludovisi Ares to raise confusions) busts and herms, a variant with changed stance and attributes, and 11 versions adapted for a portrait or a deity. Six or seven of the accepted copies are accompanied by a dog, 12 wear a chlamys, 3, clinching the sculptural type's identification with Meleager, are accompanied by a boar's head trophy, as in the Vatican Meleager (illustration, right). Ms Ridgeway accounts for the sculpture's popularity in part "by the appeal that hunting figures had for the Romans, through their heroizing connotations."

A torso in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, is rated among the superior copies, if it is indeed a Meleager. "There are other marble Meleagers," wrote Cornelius Vermeule in 1967, "one or two reaching the level of the Fogg statue but most of them documents of stonecutting devoid of the restless inner life that must have been imparted by the master to the original." Several unfinished copies found in Athens suggest that the city was a center for reproductions for the Roman market.

It is not known whether Skopas' original was carried out for the heroon at Calydon where Meleager was venerated and whether the original was carried off as a cultural trophy by one of the Romans "of taste and means".

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