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
C., should make a copy of an Arkadian boy
victor statue for Eleusis. And lastly we must not forget that up
to the present time not a single Roman copy has been conclusively
identified with that of a victor statue at Olympia. If the date of the
victory of Kyniskos were definitely fixed, the question of identity
would be better substantiated. By a process of exclusion, to be sure,
Robert reached the date Ol. 80 (= 460 B. C.),[1191] but other dates
are possible. Under these circumstances there seems to be little more
than the possibility that we have recovered an actual victor statue at
Olympia in these copies.[1192]
THE PALM-BRANCH.
The palm-branch, either woven into a wreath or held in the hand, was a
victor attribute. Pausanias says that a crown of palm leaves was common
to many contests, and that the victor everywhere in Greece carried a
palm-branch in his right hand.[1193] He refers the custom to mythical
times, tracing it back to the contest held by Theseus on Delos in honor
of Apollo.[1194] Pliny mentions a painting by the Sikyonian Eupompos,
which represented a _victor certamine gymnico palmam tenens_.[1195]
While Milchhoefer[1196] believed that the motive of an athlete setting
a crown on his head with his right hand and holding a palm in his
left, which is repeated frequently and with variation in many works of
art, went back to this painting of Eupompos, Furtwaengler[1197] goes
further in assuming that the painter derived the motive from the statue
of Polykleitos represented by the _Westmacott Athlete_ and kindred
works just discussed. The pupils of the great sculptor appear to have
transferred his school from Argos to Sikyon, and were, therefore,
associated with Eupompos. This attribute of the palm, permanent in
bronze statues, has been broken off for the most part in marble ones.
We see it in an unfinished statue of a young athlete in the National
Museum, Athens, who holds the palm-branch in his hand. Here it has
survived, since the statue was only blocked out.[1198] It is prominent
in the funerary stele from the Dipylon representing a victor, which
has been mentioned in a preceding section;[1199] here the palm extends
from the left hand, which is held down close to the side, up to the
shoulder. We have already noted that the copyist added a palm-branch
to the stump placed beside the Vatican girl runner (Pl. 2). In the
_Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo_ (Pl. 7A) the left hand should doubtless
be restored with the palm-branch, because of the projecting notch of
marble on the side of the left leg near the knee.[1200] A similar notch
appears also on the _Apollo-on-the-Omphalos_ in Athens (Pl. 7B), which
shows that the left hand held a long attribute, which was doubtless
a palm-branch. This attribute occurs frequently on vases.[1201] We
see it on a marble statue found at Formiae and now in the Glyptothek
Ny-Carlsberg in Copenhagen, which shows the same motive as that of the
statue by Stephanos (Pl. 9), though in a freer style of execution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account