The nude statues of Armodio and Aristogitone are the most outstanding in one ground-floor room. A famous has-relief (from a 5th-century B.C. original) in a nearby salon depicts Orpheus and Eurydice with Mercury. The spear-bearing nude Doryphorus, copied from a work by Polyclitus the Elder and excavated at Pompeii, enlivens another room. Also see the gigantic but weary Farnese Hercules, a statue of remarkable boldness that's a copy of an original by Lysippus, the 4th-century B.C. Greek sculptor for Alexander the Great, and was discovered in Rome's Baths of Caracalla. On a more delicate pedestal is the decapitated but exquisite Venus (Aphrodite). The Psyche of Capua shows why Aphrodite was jealous. And the Group of the Farnese Bull presents a pageant of violence from the days of antiquity; a copy of a 2nd- or a 3rd-century B.C. Hellenistic statue, one of the most frequently reproduced, it too was discovered at the Baths of Caracalla. The marble group depicts a scene in the legend of Amphion and Zethus, who tied Dirce, wife of Lycus of Thebes, to the horns of a rampaging bull.

The mezzanine galleries are devoted to mosaics excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum. These include scenes of cockfights, dragon-tailed satyrs, an aquarium, and Alexander Fighting the Persians, the finest of all. On the top floor are some of the celebrated bronzes dug out of the Pompeii volcanic mud and Herculaneum lava. Of particular interest is a Hellenistic portrait of Berenice, a comically drunken satyr, a statue of a sleeping satyr, and Mercury on a rock.