Lansdowne Heracles

Tivoli, Italy, on the site of Hadrian's Villa, 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 rather than a copy of a specific Greek original.^[4][5]

neoclassical taste; the sculptor responsible, who was probably Carlo Albacini,^[8] completed the statue's missing parts according to the sensibilities of the day: the nose was completed; the right forearm, several fingers, the rear of the lion's hide, part of the right thigh and the whole of the left calf were sculpted and assembled as discreetly as possible. The restorations were removed in the 1970s, after it was detected that iron and lead pins connecting the restorations to the original were swelling from corrosion and threatening to spall off additional pieces of marble. The 18th-century restorations were, in part, replaced with casts in epoxy resin, "to show the original as much as possible free of alien additions" according to the conservator Jerry Podany.^[9] They have been re-integrated with the sculpture more recently.^[5]