Seated Hermes

The bronze Seated Hermes, found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum in 1758, is at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. "This statue was probably the most celebrated work of art discovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the eighteenth century", Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny have observed,^[2] once four large engravings reproducing it had appeared in Le Antichità di Ercolano, 1771.^[3] To protect it from Napoleonic depredations, it was packed into one of the fifty-two cases of antiquities and works of art that accompanied the Bourbon flight to Palermo in 1798. It was once again in the royal villa at Portici in 1816 (Haskell and Penny 1981:269).

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seated Hermes