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
Accordingly, since only victors who had won three or more contests at
Olympia could set up iconic statues, the great majority of statues
there represented some ideal type of common applicability, in which
there was no attempt to show the individual features of this or that
victor, but rather the typical athlete of muscular build. The older
statues were merely variations of a few types which were held to be
appropriate to the purpose. In process of time these few types in their
treatment of details gradually approached truth to nature; this was
especially characteristic of the Peloponnesian schools, which adopted
the _Doryphoros_ of Polykleitos as their norm of proportions. Statues
of victors were the stock subject of the closely related schools of
Argos and Sikyon.[533] Doubtless, as E. A. Gardner says,[534] there
existed at Olympia itself a school of subordinate artists, who filled
the regular demand for victor statues. However, some of these statues,
especially those of the fifth and fourth centuries B. C., as we see
them in originals and in Roman copies, and read the æsthetic judgments
of them in Greek writers, were real works of art.
ÆSTHETIC JUDGMENTS OF CLASSICAL WRITERS.
The literary evidence for Greek sculpture is, for the most part, very
unsatisfactory. Though classical writers were uncritical and not fond
of analysis, still they have left us some useful opinions about works
of sculpture and painting. The history and criticism of sculpture
began in Greece, in the fourth century B. C., with the Peripatetics.
Aristotle, whose observations on painting and sculpture were slight,
did not despise the “mimetic” arts as did the Socrates of Plato.[535]
In the _Rhetoric_[536] he speaks of the beautiful bodies of youths who
trained as pentathletes, since the varied exercises of the pentathlon
made them so. We have a similar opinion expressed by Xenophon in what
is, perhaps, the most interesting passage in Greek literature on
criticism of art.[537] He has Sokrates go to the sculptor Kleito and
compliment him on his power of representing different physical types
produced by various contests, noting differences between statues of
runners and wrestlers and between those of boxers and pancratiasts.
When asked how he makes statues lifelike, Kleito has no answer, and
the philosopher says it is by the imitation of real men, _i. e._,
nature. He adds: “Must you not then imitate the threatening eyes of
those who are fighting and the triumphant expression of those who
are victorious?” Though some have thought that these words refer to
portrait statues, which were spoken of as a matter of course at the
beginning of the fourth century B. C., it is more reasonable to suspect
that Sokrates was speaking of the older sculptors—for we may recognize
Polykleitos in Kleito[538]—and consequently that he is not referring
to portraiture. In the _Symposium_ of Xenophon[539] Sokrates also
complains that the long-distance runners (δολιχοδρόμοι) have thick
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