Head of an Athlete, School of Praxiteles. Metropolitan Museum, New York.
When we consider heads of gods and heroes we find the swollen ears on a variety of types. We see them on the so-called Borghese Warrior of the Louvre (Fig. [43]),[1263] formerly called a Gladiator, and on the marble statue of Kresilæan style in Munich, which has been known since Brunn’s interpretation as Diomedes (carrying off the Palladion from Troy) (Pl. [21]).[1264] This latter statue is a careful, though inexact, Hadrianic copy of a famous work and is shown to represent the hero, and not an athlete, by the mantle thrown over the arm. Skill in the boxing match, the roughest and most dangerous of sports, is as appropriate to Diomedes as to Herakles himself. The crushed ears appear on the Dresden replica of this statue, a cast from the Mengs collection, the original of which was once probably in England,[1265] but do not appear on the poor copy in the Louvre.[1266] They also appear on the Myronian bust in the Riccardi Palace, Florence, which is a copy of an original that was, perhaps, the forerunner of the Kresilæan Diomedes.[1267] Here again the garment thrown over the left shoulder shows that a youthful hero, and not an athlete, is intended.
On heads of Herakles the swollen ears are very common. The first dated representation of the hero with battered ears appears to be
Fig. 31.—Head of Herakles, from Genzano. British Museum London. on coins of Euagoras I, the king of Salamis in Cyprus during the years 410–374 B. C.[1268] We have several examples in sculpture from the fourth century B. C. Thus swollen ears and the victor fillet appear on the Skopaic head in the Capitoline Museum.[1269] Another example is the terminal bust of the youthful hero found in 1777 at Genzano, and now in the British Museum (Fig. [31]).[1270] This head wreathed with poplar leaves, is probably a Græco-Roman copy of an original of the fourth century B. C., by an artist of the school of Lysippos. In the group representing Herakles and his son Telephos, a Roman copy in the Museo Chiaramonti of the Vatican, the hero is represented with fillet and battered ears.[1271] A Parian marble head, encircled by a crown, in the Glyptothek, going back to a Lysippan bronze original, seems to come from the statue of the hero represented as a victor.[1272] Another life-size head, of poor workmanship, in the Chiaramonti collection of the Vatican, sometimes confused with the Doryphoros head-type, seems to come from a statue of Herakles, as shown by the broken ears and rolled fillet, the latter a well-known attribute of the hero taken from the symposium.[1273] A much finer replica is the bust from Herculaneum now in Naples.[1274] Swollen ears appear also on heads of Ares. We may instance the helmeted one in the Louvre,[1275] and especially the replica in the Palazzo Torlonia in Rome.[1276] They are less prominent on a Parian marble head of the god in the Glyptothek, which appears to be a copy of an original of which the Ares Ludovisi is a more complete one.[1277]
PLATE 21
Statue of Diomedes with the Palladion. Glyptothek, Munich.