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
[Illustration: PLATE 25
Marble Group of Pancratiasts. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.]
Kapros of Elis was the first of seven Olympic victors to emulate
the fabled feat of Herakles by winning the pankration and wrestling
matches on the same day—that is, he was the first professional
strong man.[1787] The other six all came from the East. It has been
suggested[1788] that the colossal _Farnese Herakles_ found in Rome
in the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla in 1540 and now in Naples,
inscribed as the work of the Athenian Glykon, which represents the hero
leaning wearily on his club against a rock,[1789] may represent
the type of these professional strong men, who called themselves the
successors of Herakles. But such a suggestion is as unfounded as the
one already examined, which identifies the original of the _Seated
Boxer_ of the Museo delle Terme (Pl. 16 and Fig. 27) with Kleitomachos
of Thebes, the redoubtable opponent of Kapros, since the dates in both
cases are against such identifications. The Farnese statue and other
replicas of the same original[1790] obviously revert to a Lysippan
original, though they are considerably metamorphosed by the taste of a
later age. Such big swollen muscles at first sight appear to be alien
to the sculptor of the graceful _Agias_, but that the Naples copy by
Glykon—who, from the inscription on the base, must be referred to the
first century B. C.[1791]—really represents the work of Lysippos seems
well established by the fact that a smaller copy, though still over
life-size, of poorer workmanship, in the Pitti Gallery in Florence,
is inscribed as Λυσίππου ἔργον.[1792] This type of weary hero appears
in the _Telephos_ group on the small Pergamene frieze, but is even
earlier, since the latter seems to have been borrowed from a statue
which is reproduced on a coin of Alexander, which was struck at least
as early as 300 B. C.[1793] The type of Herakles wearied by his
superhuman labors was inaugurated still earlier by Lysippos, who was
fond of representing the hero in many poses, seated and standing,
resting and laboring. We might mention his colossal bronze statue
of Herakles, which was set up in Tarentum and then carried to Rome
and placed on the Capitol by Q. Fabius Maximus, when Tarentum was
captured in 209 B. C., and was later transferred to the Hippodrome
at Constantinople, where it remained until the sack of that city by
the Franks in 1204.[1794] It is hazardous, therefore, to reject the
evidence, and it will be best to see in the original a genuine Lysippan
work, as do Bulle, Overbeck, von Mach, Schnaase,[1795] and others, and
so to make Glykon responsible only for the exaggerations of his own
copy. Thus we have to face the fact of divergent styles in the great
bronze founder of the fourth century B. C., even if we admit with
Richardson that “for our peace of mind this statue might well have been
sunk in the sea.”[1796]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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