Pan with a Goat and a Bird

Roman art

This sculpture group depicts Pan, in a frontal pose, with a bird to his right and a goat to his left. The god is portrayed while playing the pan pipes, a wind instrument made of reeds, which he holds in his right hand. His left arm is draped with a goat skin and supports a type of shepherd’s staff called a pedum. Pan is portrayed with goat-like features, including horns on his head, pointed ears and hooves. The satyr-like expression of his face, which is heavily restored, is emphasised by his partially open mouth, elongated eyes and pointed nose.

Originally in enclosure one, along Viale delle Fontane, where it was reported by Iacomo Manilli in 1650 and Domenico Montelatici in 1700, the sculpture was depicted in a seventeenth-century engraving by Venturini, where we see it was used to decorate the round fountain. It was reported in its current location, the portico, in 1840.

Based on style and comparison with similar works, it is a second-century CE Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. 

Object details

Commentary

This sculpture group was reported by Iacomo Manilli in 1650 and Domenico Montelatici in 1700 in enclosure one along Viale delle Fontane. It is described by the former as a ‘faun’, and by the latter as a ‘satyr, or rather Pan, god of the shepherds, holding pan pipes and with a goat and a carrion crow at his feet (Manilli 1650, p. 11; Montelatici 1700, p. 22). A seventeenth-century engraving by Venturini shows the sculpture decorating the round fountain (Falda c. 1691, pl. 15). In 1832, Antonio Nibby described it as a ‘satyr of middling quality, between an eagle and a ram’ (Nibby 1832, p. 130, no. 7) and it was reported in its current location, the portico, in 1840 in Indicazione delle opere antiche di scultura esistenti nel primo piano della Villa Borghese (p. 24, no. 10).

The work depicts a standing Pan bringing his pan pipes to his lips with his right hand, while his left arm, hanging down his left side and wrapped in a goat skin, supports a curved shepherd’s staff called a pedum. There are two animals at his feet: on the right, a large bird; on his left, a male goat, which turns its head to look at the god. Pan is represented with clear goat-like features, the heavily-reworked face marked by a pointed nose, elongated eyes, a partially-open grinning mouth and pointed ears. The hair, like the beard and moustache, is divided into short, untidy curls, peeking out from which are two small horns. The head and torso, the latter marked by the well-defined musculature of the arms and chest, are turned slightly to the left. The thighs are covered with unruly twisted locks of thick fur that comes down below the knees, and the legs end in hoofed feet.

The sculpture can be considered a second-century Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. The iconographic type of Pan standing while playing the pan pipes is also found in statues at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum (Marquardt 1995, pp. 97–98, pl. 14.1) and in a museum in Cyrene, both of which show the god flanked by a goat (Paribeni 1959, p. 122, no. 349, pl. 159). The story of the invention of this musical instrument, which explains its close tie to the god, is found in Ovid: when Pan failed to catch hold of the nymph Syrinx, who was transformed by her companions into reeds, he sighed, enchanted by their sweet sound: ‘This way of communing with you is still left to me’. And he fashioned a musical instrument out of them, binding reeds of different lengths together, and called it a syrinx, another name for pan pipes, after the nymph (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.682–712).

Giulia Ciccarello