The Wild Boar

Il Porcellino (Eng. ‘Piglet’) or ‘The Wild Boar’ is the local Florentine nickname for a bronze fountain of a boar, from which this plaster copy was cast from.
The fountain figure was sculpted and cast by Baroque master Pietro Tacca (1577-1640) shortly before 1643, following a marble Italian copy of a Hellenistic marble original, at the time in the Grand Ducal collections and today in deplay in the classical section of the Uffizi Museum.
The original, which was found in Rome and removed to Florence in the mid-16th century by the Medici, was associated from the time of its discovery with the Calydonian Boar of Greek Myth.
Visitors to Il Porcellino put a coin into the boar’s gaping jaws, with the intent to let it fall through the underlying grating for good luck, and they rub the boar’s snout to ensure a return to Florence, a tradition that the Scottish literary traveller Tobias Smollett already noted in 1766, which has kept the snout in a state of polished sheen while the rest of the boar’s body has patinated to a dull brownish-green.