Читать книгу Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art - Walter Woodburn Hyde - Страница 18

Table of Contents

Plates 2–7 and Figures 3–8.

Only a few insignificant remnants of the forest of victor statues which once stood in the Altis at Olympia were unearthed by the German excavators. Most of these statues already in antiquity had been carried off to Italy,416 while those which escaped the spoliation of the Roman masters of Greece were destroyed at the hands of the invading hordes of barbarians in the early Dark Ages. Consequently only here and there in modern museums can isolated fragments of these originals be discovered, which have accidentally survived the ravages of time and man.

In the almost complete absence of originals, therefore, we depend for our knowledge of them on a variety of sources. In attempting to reconstruct them we have two main sources of information to aid us, the literary and the archæological. To the former belong the many inscriptions found on the statue bases recovered at Olympia, which contain the name and native city of the victor, the athletic contest in which his victory was won, and frequently some account of his former athletic history; epigrams preserved in the Greek anthologies and elsewhere, some of which agree with those inscribed on the statue bases; more or less definite statements of scholiasts and the classical writers in general, especially the detailed account of the monuments of Olympia contained in the fifth and sixth books of the Ἑλλάδος περιήγησις of Pausanias, who visited the Altis during the reign of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,417 and also the somewhat systematic treatment of Greek sculptors and their works in the elder Pliny’s chapters on the History of Art.418 To the latter source belong the remnants of statues in bronze and marble found at Olympia, as well as the recovered bases, on many of which the extant footmarks enable us to recover the pose of the statues which formerly stood upon them. Finally, in reconstructing these athlete statues, an intimate knowledge of Greek sculpture in all its phases and periods is essential. Here, as in the general study of Greek sculpture, where the destruction of originals has been almost complete, we are largely dependent on Roman copies which were executed by more or less skilled workmen, chiefly for wealthy Roman patrons of art who wished to use them to decorate the public buildings, baths, palaces, and villas of Rome and other Italian cities. A careful study of these copies has evolved a series of groups, which have been assigned with more or less probability to this or that artist.419 Representations of the various poses of the athlete statues of Olympia and elsewhere are found also on every sort of sculptured and painted works—reliefs, vases, coins, gems—which are, therefore, valuable in any attempt to reconstruct the attitude of a given statue.

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. Mueller420 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.