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
A very similar scene has long been known from a fresco painting from
Tiryns, now in Athens.[6] A bull is represented galloping to the left,
while a man[7] clings to its horns with his right hand and is swept
along with one foot lightly touching the bull’s back and the other
swung aloft. Most early writers interpreted this scene as a bull-hunt,
the artist having drawn the hunter above the bull through ignorance
of perspective. The execution is very inferior, three attempts of the
bungling painter being visible in the painting of the tail and the
front legs. Others saw in it the representation of an acrobat showing
his dexterity by leaping upon the back of an animal in full career,
recalling the description of such a trick in the Iliad, where Ajax is
represented as rushing over the plain like a man who, while driving
four horses, leaps from horse to horse.[8] But this figure must take
its place side by side with the one from Knossos just described as
another bull-grappling scene. That such sports were not held in the
open air, but in an enclosed courtyard, is shown by the seal from
Praisos now in the Candia Museum, which depicts a man vaulting on
the back of a gigantic ox within a paved enclosure.[9] Doubtless the
theatral areas discovered at Phaistos by the Italian Archæological
Mission[10] and at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans in 1903[11] were not
large enough for bull scenes and were used merely for ceremonial
dancing and perhaps for the boxing matches to be described.[12] Similar
acrobats are doubtless to be recognized in the two beautiful ivory
statuettes, only 11.5 inches in height, of so-called leapers, found
by Dr. Evans at Knossos in 1901.[13] These masterpieces of the late
Minoan II period represent acrobats (one is probably a woman) darting
through the air. “The life, the freedom, the _élan_ of these figures is
nothing short of marvellous,” writes Dr. Evans, who calls attention to
the careful physical training shown in their slender legs and in the
muscles, even the veins on the back of the hands and the finger-nails
being plainly indicated as well as the details of the skinfolds at the
joints. They doubtless formed a part of an ivory model of the bull-ring
and are meant for miniature toreadors, who were hung in the air by
fine gold wires[14] over the backs of ivory bulls who stood on the
solid ground. The heads of the figures are thrown backwards, a posture
suitable for such vaulters, but not for leapers or divers. Minoan art
culminated in these statuettes and in certain stucco figures in half
relief found also at Knossos. Only a few fragments of these reliefs
have survived, most of which were decorative or architectonic in
character, though among them were also found human _disjecta membra_
in high relief, such as the fragment of a left forearm holding a horn,
and not a pointed vase, as Dr. Evans thought. Here the muscles are well
indicated, though the veins are exaggerated.[15] This fragment may well
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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