Читать книгу Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art - Walter Woodburn Hyde - Страница 32

Apollo figures in mythology as an athlete. In the Iliad, at the opening of the boxing match between Epeios and Euryalos,730 he is mentioned as the god of boxing, which refers, perhaps, to his presiding over the education of youths (κουροτρόφος) and to his gift of manly prowess. Pausanias records that he overcame Hermes in running and Ares in boxing.731 He gives these victories of the god as the reason why the flute played a Pythian air at the later pentathlon. Plutarch says that the Delphians sacrificed to Apollo the boxer (πύκτης), and the Cretans and Spartans to Apollo the runner (δρομαῖος).732 Apollo’s fight with Herakles to wrest from the hero the stolen tripod of Delphi,733 which is the subject of many surviving works of art,734 is outside the realm of athletics. As with Hermes, it is often difficult to distinguish between statues of Apollo and those of victors assimilated to his type. A good instance of this doubt is afforded by the long and indecisive discussion of the monument represented by several replicas, especially by the Choiseul-Gouffier statue in the British Museum (Pl. 7A), and the so-called Apollo-on-the-Omphalos (Pl. 7B) found in 1862 in the ruins of the theatre of Dionysos at Athens, and now in the National Museum there.735 The bronze original of these marble copies must have been famous, to judge from the number of replicas of it. It has been ascribed to many different artists—to Kalamis, Pythagoras, Alkamenes, Pasiteles,736 to one on more, to another on less probability. As A. H. Smith has pointed out, the krobylos treatment of the hair almost certainly indicates an Attic sculptor of the first half of the fifth century B.C. But here again the main interest in these copies is to determine whether the original represented Apollo or an athlete. The connection between the Athens replica and the omphalos found with it is all but disproved737 and can not be used as evidence that the statue represents the god. However, the original has been called an Apollo because of the presence of a quiver on certain of the copies. Thus, while we have a tree-trunk beside the Choiseul-Gouffier example, we have a quiver on the copy in the Palazzo Torlonia in Rome,738 and on a similar statue in the Fridericianum in Kassel,739 and both tree and quiver on the fragment of a leg from the Palatine now in the Museo delle Terme.740 The Ventnor head in the British Museum741 has long locks suited to Apollo, and the head from Kyrene there742 was actually found in a temple of Apollo. It has also been pointed out that the head of a similar figure, undoubtedly an Apollo, appears on a relief in the Capitoline Museum,743 and a similar figure is found on a red-figured krater in Bologna, which shows the god standing on a pillar with a laurel wreath in the lowered left hand and a bowl in the right.744 On coins of Athens, moreover, we see the figure of Apollo in a similar attitude with a laurel wreath in the lowered right hand and a bow in the left.745 From such evidence a good case for an Apollo has been made out by many scholars—A. H. Smith, Winter,746 Helbig,747 Conze,748 Furtwaengler,749 Schreiber,750 Dickins, and others. The evidence of the quiver in the delle Terme fragment and the Torlonia replica is looked upon as a deliberate device of the copyist to indicate the god. The attempt especially to connect it with the Apollo Alexikakos of Kalamis751 must certainly fall, since the date is about the only thing in its favor. In the long list of statues ascribed to this sculptor,752 there is none of an athlete, and the Choiseul-Gouffier type, whether it represents Apollo or an athlete, has a markedly athletic character. If the Delphi Charioteer (Fig. 66) be ascribed to Kalamis, certainly this type of statue can have nothing to do with him or his school. Nor is the type at all identical with the Alexikakos appearing on coins of Athens,753 in which the locks of hair, in the true archaic fashion of a cultus statue, fall down over the god’s shoulders. Besides, the work of Kalamis, characterized by λεπτότης and χάρις,754 must have been of the delicate later archaic style of the transition period.

PLATE 7A Statue of the so-called Apollo Choiseul-Gouffier. British Museum, London.

PLATE 7B Statue of the so-called Apollo-on-the-Omphalos. National Museum, Athens.

Waldstein, however, has made a good case against the evidence adduced for interpreting the original as Apollo and he believes that the statue represents an athlete.755 The thongs thrown over the stump in the Choiseul-Gouffier statue, doubtless those of a boxer, seem to point to an athlete for that copy at least. The muscular form and athletic coiffure of all the copies also point to the same conclusion, even if Waldstein’s ascription of the original statue to the boxer Euthymos, whose statue by Pythagoras of Rhegion stood in the Altis at Olympia,756 is only a guess. Wolters thinks the Choiseul-Gouffier statue may represent an athlete, but is against Waldstein’s ascription of the work to Pythagoras.757

Though differing in detail, the rendering of the hair, common to all the replicas, is a purely athletic coiffure. The argument for attributing the original to Apollo, based on the curls around the face, is of no importance, since a similar coiffure appears on many ephebe heads by various Attic masters of the same or a slightly earlier period. The hair treatment on a little-known replica of the head in the British Museum758 gives us an additional argument in determining whether the original was an Apollo or not. On this head there are two corkscrew curls side by side just back of the ears, which are so inorganically attached and so unsuited to the style of head as to make us believe that they were added by the copyist, even if their absence in other copies were not proof enough of this fact. Apparently the copyist adopted a well-known type of athlete and tried to convert it into an Apollo by the use of this Apolline hair attribute. The only other Apolline attribute, the quiver on the copies in the Palazzo Torlonia759 and Museo delle Terme, may have been added as a fortuitous adjunct by the copyists, who were converting an original athlete statue into one of Apollo. It may be added, also, that the quiver does not always indicate the god, as we shall see in discussing the Delian Diadoumenos (Pl. 18). When we consider, therefore, the athletic pose, the massive outline and proportions, the high-arched chest, the muscular arms and thighs, the accentuation of the veins,760 the fashion of the hair, and the relatively small size of the head, together with the presence of the boxing-thongs on the London example, it seems reasonable to conclude that in this series of copies we may see an original athlete statue, which in certain cases was later transformed into statues of Apollo. Even if the original was actually an Apollo, its proportions were far better suited to the patron of athletic exercises than to the leader of a celestial choir.

An instance of the similar use of the same type of head is shown by the colossal statue of Apollo unearthed at Olympia.761 Here we see the same coiffure as in the heads discussed, but the presence of the remnants of a lyre indubitably shows that this copy was intended for Apollo, and so it has been rightly assigned by Treu, not to the fifth, but to a later century. When long hair was no longer the fashion for athletes, a later artist might mistakenly think that the earlier plaits were genuinely Apolline, though we know that they were common to all early athletic art. Another head in the British Museum has been ably discussed by Mrs. Strong,762 who shows that it comes from an Apollo and not from an athlete statue. It is similar to an Apollo pictured on a stater struck at Mytilene about 400 B.C.,763 and consequently, like the statue from Olympia, it is merely an instance of the process of converting an athlete statue into that of an Apollo.

The marble copy of the Diadoumenos of Polykleitos, found on the island of Delos in 1894, and now in the National Museum in Athens764 (Pl. 18), has a chlamys and a quiver introduced on the marble support against the right leg. Until recently these attributes were regarded as the arbitrary introductions of the Hellenistic copyist, who wished to convert the famous athlete statue into one of Apollo, but lately it has been suggested that they belonged to the original statue, which is assumed to have represented Apollo. Thus, Hauser has propounded the theory that the Diadoumenos was originally an Apollo.765 He does not believe that the Delian sculptor could have transformed a short-haired athlete into an Apollo, since the typical Apollo after the time of Praxiteles was never represented as athletic. He later supported his theory that the Diadoumenos was originally an Apollo by the evidence of a bronze statuette and a Delphian coin, and reasserted his view that so virile a short-haired Apollo did not originate with the later copyist, but in the fifth century B.C.766 Hauser’s argument that Apollo was the original of the Diadoumenos seems as unsuccessful as his contention that Polykleitos’ other great creation, the Doryphoros, is to be classed as an Achilles.767 Loewy has sufficiently opposed Hauser’s theory of the Diadoumenos, by showing that the palm-tree prop in all the marble replicas of that statue points to athletic victories.768 He rightly explains the Apolline attributes of the Delian copy as the perfectly natural additions of an artist who lived on the island reputed to be the birthplace of the god. His ascription of the Polykleitan statue to the pentathlete Pythokles, the base of whose statue at Olympia has been found,769 is doubtful. More recently Ada Maviglia has shown the literary grounds for regarding the Diadoumenos as an athlete, and not an Apollo.770

The difficulty of distinguishing between statues of athletes and Apollo is also shown by the very beautiful fifth century B.C. Parian marble head in Turin,771 which is certainly a copy of an original Greek bronze. Furtwaengler, because of the hair, wrongly believed it the head of a diadoumenos, and connected it with Kresilas,772 while Amelung and Wace773 have found in it Attic and Polykleitan influences. The hair is parted over the centre of the forehead, as in the Diadoumenos and the Doryphoros, and in other works attributed to the Polykleitan school, while the locks over the ears and the plaits wound round the head have Attic analogues.774