Location: Parterre
Parterre In the Park of Miramare, to the rear end of the parterre, in front of the cafeteria commissioned by Maximilian of Habsburg, a male figure modelled in a zinc casting from the Berlin factory of Moritz Geiss is placed on a stone pedestal.
. This is a reproduction of the marble statue of Meleager found in 1838 near Civitavecchia, in the excavations of the villa of Ulpianus in Santa Marinella, known as the “Berlin Meleager” because it is kept at in the Altes Museum in the German capital.
The Berlin work is a third-century CE Roman copy of a Greek original attributed for the characterisation of the face, with sunken eyes and half-open mouth, to the sculptor Skopas, active in the fourth century BCE, Meleager, who in the Greek myth killed the Calydonian boar.
He is presented in the Miramare statue according to the traditional iconography of a young hunter bearing a spear: it is a faithful representation of the model except in one element, namely his faithful dog is missing at the hero’s side.
This was Maximilian’s decision, because Meleager’s dog was reproduced separately, and placed in an independent position beside the Kaffehaus entrance, one would say to symbolically guard it. The statue of Meleager’s dog has unfortunately gone lost, but it can still be seen in twentieth-century photos of the park taken during Duke Amedeo of Savoy-Aosta’s stay at Miramare.
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