The Arrotino - France, Second half of the 18th century

This figure of a crouching man sharpening a knife is a replica of a famous ancient Hellenistic marble from the 2nd century BC known as the Arrotino or Rotatore. Now kept at the Uffizi Museum in Florence, it depicts a Scythian slave preparing a knife for the god Apollo, who was about to skin the satyr Marsyas, whose musical talents and hubris had drawn the god's wrath.
This antique, well known in 16th-century Rome, was acquired by Cardinal Medici in 1578. After spending some time in his villa, it was sent to Florence in 1697 and exhibited in the famous Uffizi gallery. So successful was it that in 1684 Louis XIV commissioned the Florentine Baroque master Giovanni Battista Foggini to make a marble replica of the Arrotino. Today exhibited in the Louvre, Foggini's work long adorned the gardens of the Château de Versailles, before being installed in the Tuileries gardens in 1872. In 1992, in a move to preserve it, it was finally moved to the sculpture department, where it had been damaged by the weather.
At the same time, between 1685 and 1686, plaster models of the Arrotino, possibly based on Foggini's marble copy, were delivered to François Girardon. Using these, the artist made a clay model of the Rotatore on a scale of one, which was cast in bronze in 1688 by the king's bronzemaker, Balthazar Keller. Now kept at Versailles, this cast first adorned the appartments of the verts de Marly in 1695, before being displayed in the Tuileries gardens in 1797. In 1871, the cast was sent to Versailles to replace the marble by Foggini, which was leaving for the Tuileries.
Enthusiasm for these royal commissions led to the production in Paris of bronze reductions of the Arrotino, often paired with a beautiful crouching Venus based on a marble by Antoine Coysevox. Similar reductions of the famous antique were also made in Italy, notably at the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century in the Roman workshops of Giovanni Zoffoli, but these Grand Tour bronzes are smaller in size and have different cast properties.Our bronze was probably made in a Parisian workshop, based on Keller's cast or Foggini's marble. However, the originality of our Arrotino imposing nose, as well as the freedom taken in the representation of the knife and whetstone, make it clearly not a serial reduction of Keller's cast but rather an original creation, perhaps reinterpreting the gaps observed on Foggini's marble during the course of the 18th century.