The Rape of Polyxena
Video in Italian | The marble group of statues by Pio Fedi under the Loggia dei Lanzi
The Rape of Polyxena by Pio Fedi is a four-figure marble group that re-enacts the abduction, already narrated by Euripides and Virgil, of young Polyxena.
Ferocious Pyrrhus stands upright on the helpless body of Polite lying on the ground, and snatches Polyxena from the arms of her mother Hecuba who tries to keep her daughter to herself.
The story of the tragic end of Priam's lineage becomes an even more dramatic theatrical action in the extraordinary plastic rendering of the bodies.
Pio Fedi from Viterbo, after a long preparatory phase of studies and drawings, sculpted this work from a single block of marble between 1855 and 1865 and carried out a dialectic of feelings between losers and winners.
