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
The same motive is exemplified by many existing statues, statuettes,
reliefs, etc. The marble statue of an athlete in the Uffizi, Florence,
(Pl. 12),[1057] a copy of an original of the end of the fifth century
B. C., wrongly restored as holding in both hands a vase at which
the athlete is looking down, was interpreted by Bloch as an ephebe
pouring oil from a lekythos held in the right hand into an aryballos
held in the left. This action for an athlete has been characterized
by Furtwaengler as “unparallelled, unclassical and, above all,
absurd.” Through recent discoveries we now know that it represents an
apoxyomenos, and that it should be restored with the left forearm close
to the thigh, and with the right crossing the abdomen diagonally in
the direction of the left hand. This attitude so closely corresponds
with that of a figure on a gem as to make it probable that both gem and
statue are copies of the same original. The figure on the gem[1058]
holds a strigil in both hands and is generally explained as scraping
the dirt from the left thigh; the light hand holds the handle and the
left the blade. A hydria, palm-branch, and crown are pictured to the
right—showing that the figure represents an athlete, just as the statue
has the swollen ears of one. The attention of the athlete in both
monuments is concentrated on the operation involved—a concentration
reminding us of Myron’s _Diskobolos_. While, however, in the latter
work the concentration is momentary, it is less transient in the
Florence statue and also in the Munich _Oil-pourer_. This pose is too
conscious in the Florentine statue to be the work of Myron. Arndt names
no artist, but as the similarity between the head of the statue and
that of the _Oil-pourer_ is so marked, and as every one now regards the
latter as Attic—even if not by Alkamenes—he thinks that the two must
be by the same Attic sculptor, although the Uffizi statue is somewhat
later than the Munich one.[1059] The original of the Florence statue
was famous, if we may judge by the existing number of replicas with
variations.[1060]
Among statues showing the same motive and pose, we may note the
bronze statue of an athlete over life-size—pieced together from 234
fragments—found by the Austrians at Ephesos and now in Vienna.[1061]
The subject, pose, and heavy proportions recall the Argive school
of Polykleitos, and its original has been assigned by Hauser to the
Sikyonian Daidalos, the son and pupil of Patrokles, who was the pupil
of Polykleitos. As further reproductions of the same type of figure, we
may cite a bronze statuette in Paris,[1062] and a marble one found at
Frascati in 1896 and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.[1063]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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