Lansdowne Heracles Stock Photo

The Lansdowne Heracles is a Roman marble sculpture of about 125 CE. Today it is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum's Getty Villa in Malibu, California. The statue, representing the hero Heracles as a beardless Lysippic youth grasping the skin of the Nemean lion with his club upon his shoulder, was discovered in 1790 on the site of Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, Italy, where many fine Hadrianic copies and pastiches of Greek sculptures had been discovered since the 16th century. Today, the sculpture is considered to be an example of Roman-era improvisations on the Greek sculptural style of the fourth century BCE than a copy of a specific Greek original.