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
Taking into account all these sources of knowledge, it has been
possible to reach tolerable certainty in reconstructing the main types
of these victor monuments, and in identifying schools, masters, and
individual works. This identification of athlete statues, especially
those belonging to the fifth and fourth centuries B. C., among the
countless Roman works which people modern museums, has already been
achieved in many cases by archælogical investigations. The work of
many masters of the archaic period and of the most important bronze
sculptors of the great period of Greek art has been illustrated by
such ascriptions; especially that of Myron, who represented figures
in rhythmic action full of life and vigor; of the elder Polykleitos,
who was a master in representing standing figures at rest fashioned
according to a mathematical system of proportions; of Lysippos, who
introduced a new canon of proportions in opposition to that of his
predecessor Polykleitos, and who inaugurated the naturalistic tendency
in Greek art, which was destined to he carried to such unbecoming
lengths in succeeding centuries. The further identification of such
statues, as our knowledge of the tendencies and traditions of the
schools of Greek sculpture and our sources of information about
athletic art become more and more extended, will be one of the most
important tasks of the archæologist in the future.
Before discussing the appearance of individual types of these
monuments, we shall consider certain general characteristics common to
all of them. Long ago K. O. Mueller[420] summed up the common features
of victor statues in these words: _Kurzgelocktes Haar, tuechtige
Glieder, eine kraeftige Ausbildung der Gestalt und verhaeltnissmaessig
kleine Koepfe characterisiren die ganze Gattung von Figuren; die
zerschlagenen Ohren und die hervorgetriebenen Muskeln insbesondere die
Faustkaempfer und Pankratiasten._ Though in the main this excellent
summary still holds good, we are now in a position to correct it in
part and to add other equally characteristic features to it. We shall
briefly discuss, therefore, in the light of recent investigations,
certain of the characteristics common to this _genre_ of sculpture—the
material and size of these statues, their nudity and fashion of wearing
the hair, their twofold division into iconic and aniconic, their
proportions, and, lastly, the assimilation of their appearance to
well-known types of hero or god.
SIZE OF VICTOR STATUES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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