The sculptor, inspired by the ancient myth spread above all by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, captures the moment in which Pluto, king of the underworld, forcefully kidnaps Proserpina, daughter of the goddess Ceres, who desperately raises her arm towards the sky in an extreme seeking help. Francesco Maria Schiaffino, trained in Rome in the studio of Camillo Rusconi, proposes a model by the master in turn inspired by the famous group by Gian Lorenzo Bernini kept in Rome in the Borghese Gallery, resolving its accentuated dynamism in a more decorative rendering typical of the sensitivity of Rococo culture. At the feet of the two characters, the fearsome three-headed dog of the god, Cerberus, attends the event, according to the ancient guardian of the afterlife. The sculptor obtains a very fine rendering of details, making the marble almost ductile as seen in the hands of Pluto pressing on Proserpina's soft flesh. The drama will then end with a happy ending: thanks to a pomegranate offered to her by Pluto, Proserpina will fall in love with the god until she marries him and becomes the queen of Hades. However, she was allowed to live six months a year on earth with her mother Ceres, making the meadows bloom and starting spring. The ancients with this myth explained the changing of the seasons.

The four sculptures are part of the famous series called The Metamorphoses which has decorated the Gallery of Mirrors since the eighteenth century. Filippo Parodi, the greatest Genoese sculptor of the seventeenth century, after having assimilated the lesson of Gian Lorenzo Bernini to Rome, translated into marble with great virtuosity and poetic sensitivity some of the myths taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses Fables that tell of young people and nymphs transformed by the gods into natural elements as happens to Adonis changed from Venus into an anemone and Clizia transfigured into a sunflower by Apollo.

The magnificent sculpture offers a moving image of the suffering Christ while, deprived of strength, he seems to collapse next to the column of the flagellation. The artist, trained in Rome in the Berninian context, seems to sublimate the pain of the scourged in the almost ecstatic expression of the face and in the refined elegance of the model, suitable for a space reserved for private devotion.

The statue, reinstated with irrelevant parts according to a use in vogue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, originally portrayed a young athlete transformed with the addition of the knot of curls on the forehead, an attribute of the divinity, in the image of the Greek god Dionysus. Similar alterations can also be seen in the other ancient statues in the gallery, aimed at making the subjects of the sculptures coincide with those of the general iconographic program of the sumptuous environment.

The work originally belonged to the inventory of the private property of the king, as it was purchased by the sovereign from one of the Genoese promoters of the second half of the nineteenth century. The refined portrait of the young woman, with a hairstyle embellished with flowers and a rose placed in the neckline of the dress, seems to identify with the goddess Flora. The pose of the figure and the rendering of the modeling, still pervaded by romantic sensibility, already reflect the naturalistic culture that also established itself in Genoa between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and had a strong hold in the bourgeois environment.