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
While the Akropolis ephebe, already discussed as showing Argive
influence (Fig. 17), still shows but little break with the law of
“frontality” formulated by J. Lange,[1290] whereby an “imaginary line
passing through the skull, nose, backbone, and navel, dividing the body
into two symmetrical halves, is invariably straight, never bending to
either side,” the _Tyrannicides_ have broken it completely. The ephebe
has his head slightly turned to one side, and, because of resemblances
in head and body to the figure of Harmodios, has been assigned to
Kritios or his school.[1291] Another statue at rest ascribed to the
same school is the athlete in the Somzée collection, which reminds us
of the Pelops of the East Gable at Olympia.[1292] We have record of
one more statue by Kritios himself, which was represented in motion
only less violent than that of the _Tyrannicides_. Pausanias saw on the
Akropolis of Athens a statue by him of the hoplite runner Epicharinos,
which represented the athlete in the attitude of one practicing starts,
perhaps in the very pose of the Tuebingen statuette (Fig. 42).[1293]
In the statues of the _Tyrannicides_, then, which might pass equally
well for typical athletes of the time, we have examples of statues in
motion at the end of the sixth century B. C.; for the same violent
action must have characterized the earlier group of Antenor as the
later one. We have seen that the Aeginetan sculptors not only made
pediment groups in action at a date not later than that of the group
by Kritios and Nesiotes, but single figures still earlier. Thus the
sculptor Glaukias represented the Karystian boy boxer Glaukos in the
act of sparring with an imaginary opponent.[1294] Though Glaukos won in
Ol. 65 (= 520 B. C.), his statue was set up later by his son, perhaps
as late as the end of the sixth century B. C., or the beginning of
the fifth, as the _floruit_ of the sculptor would show.[1295] This
is the oldest example attested by literary evidence of an athlete
statue in motion at Olympia. Whether Glaukias got his motive from
Antenor’s _Tyrannicides_, or whether his work was the older, we can not
determine, but it is safe to say that this _genre_ of statuary must
have existed at Olympia long before, as we know it did elsewhere. The
Rampin head, already discussed as a fragment of a victor statue, shows
by the turn of its neck that athlete statues represented in motion
existed at least as far back as the first half of the sixth century B.
C.[1296]
ANTIQUITY OF MOTION STATUES IN GREECE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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