Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus

Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus (also known as the Pasquino Group) is a marble sculpture so-titled due to its apparent representation of an episode in the Iliad featuring the characters Menelaus and Patroclus. The sculpture has a complex artistic and social history that illustrates the degree to which improvisatory "restorations" were made to fragments of ancient Roman sculpture during the 16th and 17th centuries, in which contemporary Italian sculptors made original and often arbitrary and destructive additions in an effort to replace lost fragments of the ancient sculptures.

The ancient nucleus of the sculpture, underneath the later additions, initially consisted of the headless torso of a man in armor supporting a heroically nude dying comrade; the group was made in the late 1st century AD, a Roman copy freely reproducing a Hellenistic Pergamene original of the mid-3rd century BC. Another version of the composition, though so dismembered and battered that the relationship is scarcely recognizable at first glance, is the so-called Pasquin, the most famous of the talking statues of Rome. It was set up on a pedestal in 1501.

The sculpture now under the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria, Florence, (illustration, right) is one of two modified versions of this subject that passed into the hands of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. (The other is in a subsidiary courtyard of Palazzo Pitti. Its history is briefly summarised below.)

The illustrated sculpture was purchased by Cosimo I, not long before 1570, soon after it was discovered in the vigna of Antonio Velli, half a Roman mile beyond Porta Portese, Rome. With the consent of Pope Pius V, it was taken immediately to Florence, where it appears in the inventory taken at Cosimo's death in 1574. The project for completing the truncated torso of the "Menelaus" figure, missing above the waist when it was found according to the Memorie (1594) of the sculptor and antiquarian Flaminio Vacca, was commissioned by Ferdinando II; the "restoration" was worked out by Pietro Tacca and executed by Lodovico Salvetti from Tacca's model, according to Filippo Baldinucci. It was set up in a niche on the south end of the Ponte Vecchio. Paolo Alessandro Maffei's engraving of 1704 shows that Menelaus then was wearing a helmet much simpler than the elaborate neoclassical one erroneously provided by Ricci seen on the sculpture today.

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