Marble Statuette of a Slave Boy with a Lantern in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2010

Marble Statuette of a Slave Boy with a Lantern
Roman, 1st or 2nd century AD
Adaptation of a Hellenistic work of the 3rd century BC

Accession # 23.160.82

This statuette is an example of a well-known subject, the servant waiting to escort his master home. A Hellenistic terracotta statuette from the Fayum, Egypt provides the earliest known evidence for this type. The subject was popular in Roman times, when marble examples served as fountain sculptures in villa gardens in Pompeii and Syria, and bronze and silver variations were made into luxurious household objects such as inkwells and pepper-castors.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.