MUSEO DEL SATIRO – MAZARA DEL VALLO

Il Satiro Danzante di Mazara del Vallo è l’emblema della bellezza mediterranea, esempio del patrimonio sommerso  recuperato nel Canale di Sicilia.
The precious bronze statue, datable to the end of the 4th century BC and attributable to the school of the great artist, Prassitele, is exhibited in the Museum of Sant’Egidio of Mazara del Vallo, a building of considerable architectural interest: a deconsecrated church that was built between the early 1500s and the end of the same century. It houses the precious statue since 2005, when at the end of the restoration, carried out by the Central Institute for Restoration of Rome, the Satyr returns to Mazara del Vallo.

The bronze statue was found in two phases: in the spring of 1997 the left leg came to light and on 4 March 1998 the body lacked the other leg and arms, both recovered from the mazarese fishing boat Capitan Ciccio, commanded by Francesco Adragna. It is assumed that the statue was part of a cargo of a ship wrecked between Sicily and Capo Bon in a period of great diffusion of the antiquarian trade in antiquity.
The Satyr is caught in the moment of the ecstasy of the orgiastic dance, it rotated on the right leg holding the symbols of worship, in the left the kantharos (wine glass) and in the right the thyrsus cane adorned with a ribbon and crowned with a pine cone, he had a panther skin on his shoulder. The abandonment of the head, the flowing hair, the parted lips, the torsion of the bust make one think of the delirium of the whirling dance, added to the excitement of drinking, in which the dancer went into a trance, fixing the pinecone on the thyrsus and rotating around himself to the point of unconsciousness.

The Museum of the Satyr, in addition to the masterpiece of Praxiteles, exhibits finds from the waters of the Sicilian canal, including the bronze fragment of an elephant's paw from the Punic-Hellenistic era, a bronze cauldron from the Middle Ages, a selection of transport amphoraand from archaic, classical, Hellenistic, Punic, Roman and medieval period. Also on display are two iron cannons from Torretta Granitola, from which come some Corinthian and Ionic capitals also exhibited.