Because of the assumed lack of sculptural monuments, Reisch[1599] and others have wrongly doubted whether javelin-throwers were represented in sculpture as victors. There certainly is no a priori reason why athletic sculptors might not have made statues in any one of the three poses which Gardiner has distinguished on vase-paintings, even if this contest, like jumping, was better adapted to the painter than to the sculptor. Furthermore, we shall attempt to show that such monuments actually did exist.
[Illustration: FIG. 47.—Bust of the _Doryphoros_, after Polykleitos, by Apollonios. Museum of Naples.]
[Illustration: FIG. 48.—Statue of the _Doryphoros_, after Polykleitos. Vatican Museum, Rome.]
The best example of such a javelin-thrower seems to be the _Doryphoros_, the most famous statue of Polykleitos, in which he illustrated his canon of athletic forms. The _Doryphoros_ exists in many copies, all of which agree fairly well in style and proportions. K. Friedrichs, in his monograph _Der Doryphoros des Polyklets_, which appeared in 1863,[1600] was the first to show that the statue found in 1797 in the Palaistra at Pompeii, and now in the Naples Museum (Pl. 4), was a copy of the original bronze, as it shows all the peculiarities of the master’s style known to us from tradition.[1601] Mahler enumerates 7 statues, 17 torsos, and 36 heads copied from the original, and the fine, but expressionless, Augustan bronze bust from the villa of the Pisos, Herculaneum, inscribed as the work of the sculptor Apollonios, son of Archios, of Athens, which is now in Naples (Fig. 47).[1602] The best-preserved copy of the statue, the one in Naples, is surpassed in workmanship by the green basalt torso in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence[1603] and by the marble one formerly in the possession of Count Pourtalès in Berlin.[1604] A poorer copy is to be found in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican (Fig. 48).[1605] In these copies we see a thick-set youth standing with the weight of the body on the right leg, the left one thrown back and touching the ground only with the toes, seemingly ready to advance, though the shoulders do not partake of the walking action. He is represented, therefore, at the moment of transition from walking to a rest position—in other words in a purely theoretical pose—at rest, indeed, but just ready again to advance.[1606] His left hand held a short _akontion_ over the shoulder and not the long spear (δόρυ), whence the name _Doryphoros_ or spear-bearer is derived.[1607] The head is turned to the same side as the advanced foot, which perhaps is an example of the monotony in the work of the master complained of by ancient critics; variety would have been attained by turning it in the opposite direction. In the carefully worked bronze original, which, however, must have had an insignificant intellectual aspect, the apparently simple problem—hitherto vainly attempted in Greek art—of representing a man standing almost motionless, but full of life, was for the first time solved. It is a long way from the motionless figures known as “Apollos,” with their arms glued to the sides and their legs close together, to this vigorous athlete. As we have already indicated, Greek art developed the first step beyond the “Apollos” by further advancing one leg of a statue and, it may be, extending one forearm horizontally. The next step was to place one foot slightly sidewise and thus relieve it of the weight of the body—the well-known scheme of the “free” and “rest” leg. At first the relaxation was slight, the “free” leg not being intended to move forward, nor the parts of the body to be much shifted. Polykleitos’ innovation consisted in having the legs so placed, one behind the other, that the figure, while apparently resting on one,[1608] seemed to be advancing. On the ground of the familiar passage in Pliny cited, it has been generally assumed that Polykleitos introduced the walking motive into sculpture. However, this motive was probably the invention of the earlier Argive school, borrowed by Polykleitos for his canon, as seen in the statue of the so-called _Munich King_ (_Zeus_?), of the Glyptothek, which Furtwaengler has shown to be a work of about 460 B. C.[1609]