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
and varied.[1144] For a long time the marble copy in the British
Museum found in 1862, at Vaison, France,[1145] was, despite its poor
workmanship, considered our best copy (Fig. 28). It was made perhaps
five hundred years after the original, at a time when sculpture was in
its decline, and consequently can give us merely a suggestion of the
character of Polykleitos’ statue. As it is a direct marble translation
of the bronze, the muscular treatment appears exaggerated. Another
marble copy was found in 1894 by the French excavators on the island of
Delos, and is now in Athens (Pl. 18).[1146] The Delian artist added
a mantle and a quiver to the nearby tree-trunk and thus converted an
original victor statue into one of a god.[1147] Though its hands are
lost, it is easy to see that the athlete is pulling the ends of the
fillet together so as to tighten the knot at the back of the head. As
this is a Hellenistic Greek copy, it comes far nearer to the original
than the imperial Roman one from Vaison. The lighter proportions and
softer modeling show the Attic influence on Polykleitos’ later career,
although the fleshy forms are out of harmony with his art and evidently
introduced by the copyist. One of the best preserved and most beautiful
copies is the one in the Prado at Madrid.[1148] Although a Roman copy,
like the one in the British Museum, it comes very near the original
because of the precision in its details. There are many good copies of
the head alone.[1149] Marble heads in Kassel and Dresden, evidently the
works of Attic sculptors, show the pure Polykleitan traits. The one
in Dresden[1150] (Fig. 29) surpasses all others in the beauty of its
finish, being a careful and exact copy. The proportions and structure
of the head are those of the _Doryphoros_, although the surface is
differently treated. The Kassel head[1151] is not so exact in its
details, but has more expression. Furtwaengler rightly calls it the
better of the two as a work of art, but inferior as a copy. A marble
head in the British Museum[1152] is a direct copy from the original
bronze, like the Vaison statue. The clear-cut eyelids and wiry hair
reproduce the original material, and its resemblance to the head of the
_Doryphoros_ is greater than that of any other copy.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.—Head of the _Diadoumenos_, after Polykleitos.
Albertinum, Dresden.]
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