Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Athletic Art

by Walter Woodburn Hyde

PLATE 18

Statue of the Diadoumenos, from Delos, after Polykleitos. National Museum, Athens.

The Diadoumenos of Polykleitos was little less famous than his Doryphoros, if we may judge by the number of copies which have survived and from literary notices of it.[1142] In all the copies of this work we see the well-known Polykleitan characteristics—powerful build, heavy proportions, and fidelity to nature; but none of the ideal tendency prominent in the works of Pheidias and his school, nor of the violent energy characteristic of Myron’s art. In all of them the pose of the earlier Doryphoros is retained, except that the arms are differently employed and the build of the body is more slender. Pliny, despite his statement—which is probably taken from some Greek authority—that monotony was the characteristic of Polykleitos’ works (paene ad unum exemplum),[1143] emphasizes this slenderness by calling the Doryphoros viriliter puer—Lessing’s Juengling wie ein Mann—and the Diadoumenos molliter juvenis—a youth of gentle form. This judgment of Pliny was difficult to understand so long as we had only the Vaison copy of the Diadoumenos to study. The Delian copy showed that supple grace was characteristic of the original, even if modified to suit the taste of three centuries later. Although the body forms and the attitudes of the Doryphoros and the Diadoumenos are very similar, the head of the latter, usually assigned to Polykleitos, is of a different type from that of the Doryphoros. While the head of the Doryphoros is square in profile, flat on top, and long from front to back, that of the Diadoumenos is rounder and softer and can best be explained on the assumption that Polykleitos later in life came under Attic influence. The copies of this work are many and varied.[1144] For a long time the marble copy in the British Museum found in 1862, at Vaison, France,[1145] was, despite its poor workmanship, considered our best copy (Fig. [28]). It was made perhaps five hundred years after the original, at a time when sculpture was in its decline, and consequently can give us merely a suggestion of the character of Polykleitos’ statue. As it is a direct marble translation of the bronze, the muscular treatment appears exaggerated. Another marble copy was found in 1894 by the French excavators on the island of Delos, and is now in Athens (Pl. [18]).[1146] The Delian artist added a mantle and a quiver to the nearby tree-trunk and thus converted an original victor statue into one of a god.[1147] Though its hands are lost, it is easy to see that the athlete is pulling the ends of the fillet together so as to tighten the knot at the back of the head. As this is a Hellenistic Greek copy, it comes far nearer to the original than the

Fig. 28.—Statue of the Diadoumenos, from Vaison, after Polykleitos. British Museum, London. imperial Roman one from Vaison. The lighter proportions and softer modeling show the Attic influence on Polykleitos’ later career, although the fleshy forms are out of harmony with his art and evidently introduced by the copyist. One of the best preserved and most beautiful copies is the one in the Prado at Madrid.[1148] Although a Roman copy, like the one in the British Museum, it comes very near the original because of the precision in its details. There are many good copies of the head alone.[1149] Marble heads in Kassel and Dresden, evidently the works of Attic sculptors, show the pure Polykleitan traits. The one in Dresden[1150] (Fig. [29]) surpasses all others in the beauty of its finish, being a careful and exact copy. The proportions and structure of the head are those of the Doryphoros, although the surface is differently treated. The Kassel head[1151] is not so exact in its details, but has more expression. Furtwaengler rightly calls it the better of the two as a work of art, but inferior as a copy. A marble head in the British Museum[1152] is a direct copy from the original bronze, like the Vaison statue. The clear-cut eyelids and wiry hair reproduce the original material, and its resemblance to the head of the Doryphoros is greater than that of any other copy.

A later variant of the statue is seen in a small terra-cotta statuette from Smyrna in private possession in London.[1153]

Fig. 29.—Head of the Diadoumenos, after Polykleitos. Albertinum, Dresden. It shows the Polykleitan type so completely assimilated to the style of Praxiteles that its genuineness has been doubted. Perhaps, with its Attic softness, it gives us a better idea of the beauty of the original than many of the other copies. Finally, we must mention the original bronze head of the fifth century B. C. in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, recently published by Percy Gardner.[1154] This head, put together from nine fragments, and restored as that of a boy fillet-binder, and rivaling in delicacy and beauty such original bronzes as the Beneventum head (Fig. [3]) and the Idolino (Pl. [14]), not only gives us the best idea of the technical ability attained by bronze workers in the middle of the fifth century B. C., but also helps us to understand the ancient repute of Polykleitos’ athletes. Here the headband and “starfish” arrangement of the hair have their close parallels in the Dresden, Kassel, and British Museum heads already discussed, which essentially reproduce the head of the Vaison statue (Fig. [28]). As Gardner points out, it closely agrees with the type of the Farnese Diadoumenos (Pl. [17]) only in one particular, the mode of tying the knot. While the Vaison athlete is preparing to tie it, the Farnese one has just finished the operation, the boy still holding the ends of the fillet in his hands. But only the treatment of the hair, the eye, and the ear offers a contrast. Despite these differences Gardner follows the older view of Brunn in regarding the Vaison and Farnese types as two variants of Polykleitan originals; but the pose, style, and proportions of the latter seem to us to be too thoroughly Attic to warrant us in bringing it into relation with the work of Polykleitos. Though the heads of the two are not so dissimilar, the pose, as Gardner also points out, is quite different. The Vaison figure is represented as walking, i. e., in the very act of changing the weight of the body from one leg to the other, while the Farnese athlete stands at rest with both feet flat upon the ground. Gardner rightly regards this exquisite head not as the original of the statue mentioned by Pliny, since the Vaison and Delian copies show that the latter represented a fully developed man, somewhat over life-size, and not a boy, but rather as a work of the Polykleitan school, though he does not exclude the possibility that it may come from one of the many boy athletes of the master.

Furtwaengler connects with the Diadoumenos the statue of a youthful boxer, slightly under life-size, which shows a similar motive. It is known to us in two copies, one in Kassel,[1155] the other in Lansdowne House, London.[1156] That it is a work of Polykleitos is shown by the correspondence of its body forms with those of both the Diadoumenos and the Doryphoros. A bronze statuette, dating from about 400 B. C., in the Akropolis Museum, also repeats the motive without being an exact copy.[1157]