Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic ArtHyde, Walter Woodburn
History
Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art
Hyde, Walter Woodburn
Olympics; Sculpture, Greek; Sports -- Greece
These groups represent the highest period of Aeginetan art. They
have been dated anywhere from the end of the sixth century B. C.
down to a period after the battle of Salamis.[963] Probably a date
just after that battle is correct, as Aeginetans won prizes of valor
there.[964] Any attempt to assign them to this or that artist is merely
conjectural. The general similarity in subject to that of the Delphi
group by Onatas, which represented the death in battle of Opis, the
king of the barbarian Iapygians, at the hands of the Tarentines,[965]
and the group at Olympia already mentioned as representing a Trojan
subject, led earlier scholars to assign the slightly more advanced
statues of the East Pediment to Onatas and the more archaic ones of
the West Pediment to Kallon. But we know both these sculptors only as
bronze workers. The violent action of some of the figures reminds us
at once of Pausanias’ description of the statue of the boxer Glaukos
by the sculptor Glaukias, which we have already mentioned. But on
the whole, though they are violent, the slight proportions of these
athletic figures do not fit the appearance of boxers and pancratiasts,
which, as we have seen, formed the staple of Aeginetan sculptors, but
rather those of runners. We see a good wrestler in the _Snatcher_ of
the East Gable (Fig. 20),[966] and the corresponding figure in the
right half of the same gable.[967] The _Champion_ of the West gable
(Fig. 21, left),[968] of the finest Parian marble, represented as
lunging forward, pressing on the enemy armed with helm, spear, and
shield, would pass as a good example of a hoplitodrome, far freer and
more individual than the warrior from Dodona.
ATTIC SCULPTORS.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.—Archaic Marble Head of a Youth. Jakobsen
Collection, Ny-Carlsberg Museum, Copenhagen.]
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