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
It is to the facial characteristics in the Tegea heads that Dr. Bates
calls attention in basing his argument for the Skopaic origin of
the head from Sparta: the forehead horizontally divided by a median
line, the swelling, prominent brow, the deep-set eyes with their
narrow lids—only 2 mm. wide—embedded in the projecting flesh at the
outer corners, and the parted mouth. He also sees a resemblance in
the small round curls bunched together above the ears. But if there
are resemblances (especially in the modeling of the eyes) there are
also great differences observable in the Tegea heads and the one from
Sparta. Let us confine our comparison of the latter with the _Herakles_
of the Tegea pediment, though the comparison with any of the other male
heads would lead to substantially the same results.
In the first place the structure of the two heads in question is very
different. As the head from Sparta is broken in two at the ears and the
whole back part is missing, we can not tell whether it had the great
depth of the one from Tegea. But of the massive, bony framework of the
latter there is little trace in the former. In the Tegea example we are
struck with the squareness of the head and the breadth of the central
part of the face; the sides do not gradually converge toward the
middle, but seem to form distinct planes. The distance between the eyes
is also in keeping with the breadth of the skull as measured between
the ears; the breadth of the face almost equals its length from the top
of the forehead to the chin, and this fact, together with the massive,
prominent chin, gives an element of squareness to the whole.[2140]
On the other hand, the head from Sparta has a long, narrow face whose
sides softly converge toward the middle in beautiful curves about the
cheeks; its cheek-bones are not so high nor so prominent as those
of the other; it ends in a delicate, almost effeminate chin, which
slightly retreats and gives the whole lower part of the face an oval
structure, thus recalling Praxiteles and fourth-century Attic works.
The length of the face is accentuated by the considerable height to
which the head rises above the forehead, in contrast with the flatness
of the skull in the example from Tegea. The eyes are not so wide-open;
they are longer and not so swollen nor compressed toward the centre; if
we view the two heads from the side, we see that the eye-socket in the
Tegea head is larger and appreciably deeper than in the one from Sparta.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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