Hermes Fastening his Sandal

The sculptures of Hermes Fastening his Sandal, which exist in several versions, are all Roman marble copies of a lost Greek bronze original in the manner of Lysippos, dating to the fourth century BCE.

His swift right leg was bent at the knee, and on it he rested his left hand, and meanwhile he was turning his face up to heaven, as if he were hearing the commands of his king and father"[3] Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway prefers to call the subject The Sandal-Binder or Jason;[4] she notes, that, from the finding sites, the sculpture appears to have been popular in gardens and gymnasia.

Judging from the fully lifesize scale of the copies and their generally high quality, the original bronze must have been respected as one of the received masterpieces in the canon of antiquity (Ridgway 1964:120).

Three surviving torsos have also been identified, including one in unfinished state, which has retained its head and has escaped the eighteenth-century Roman restorers; it is now conserved at the Acropolis Museum, Athens.

Other variants include sculptures in similar, but reversed mirror-image poses, probably intended as pendants to the Hermes Fastening his Sandal.