Old Man Flaying a Kid
Unknown · 2nd century AD (?)
An old man, half bald and bearded, wearing the short one shouldered tunic of a labourer, bends to skin a young deer or goat that hangs from a tree trunk over a piece of cloth. A band is knotted around his leg. He is a slave or a rustic, and the sculptor has relished the sagging flesh, the wrinkled face and the concentration of the task. The right arm and the right thigh and leg of the man are missing, along with the ends of the animal's four legs and part of its haunch, and the top of the trunk and the base have been remade in marble.
Hellenistic sculptors discovered the poor and the old as subjects, carving fishermen, drunken women and peasants with the same care once reserved for gods. Roman copies of these genre pieces decorated gardens, where a scene of butchering made a witty ornament near the dining room. The group is dated to the second century AD and was probably made in Italy. It entered the Louvre in 1803 among the works taken from Italy under Napoleon. Compare the hard, realistic modelling with the smooth idealised gods around it.
Did You Know? The subject is pure kitchen work, a slave skinning an animal, yet it was carved with the same care as the gods around it.
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