Berlin Adorant

The Praying Boy (in German, Der betende Knabe), also known as the Berlin Adorant, is an Ancient Greek bronze statue of a naked male youth with arms raised, which stands 128 cm (50 in) high, at or perhaps slightly smaller than life size.

The incomplete bronze statue, initially missing arms and legs, was found on the island of Rhodes in the late 1400s during the construction of city walls.

It was sold to King Frederick II of Prussia in 1747, who displayed it on a terrace at Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam until 1786, when it was moved inside at the Berlin Stadtschloss.

It was removed by Soviet authorities to Saint Petersburg for a period after the Second World War, but returned to the museum in East Berlin in 1958 along with other antiquities including the Pergamon Altar.

Others attribute it to Boidas, a son of Lysippos, relying on a reference to a statue of a praying boy mentioned in Pliny's Natural History.