Diadumenos
| The Canon of Polyclitus |
|---|
| Doryphoros - Diadumenos - Discophoros |
The Diadumenos ("diadem-bearer"), together with the Doryphoros and Discophoros, are the three most famous figural types of Polyclitus, forming three basic patterns of Ancient Greek sculpture that all present strictly idealised representations of young men in a convincingly naturalistic manner.
The Diadumenos is the winner of an athletic contest at a games, still nude after the contest and lifting his arms to knot the diadem, a ribbon-band that identifies the winner and which in the bronze original of about 420 BCE would have been represented by a ribbon of bronze.[1] The figure stands in contrapposto with his weight on his right foot, his left knee slightly bent and his head inclined slightly to the right, self-contained, seeming to be lost in thought. Polyclitus and his successors (Lysippos and Scopas) all created figures of this kind.
Roman copies
Pliny's Natural History described Roman
marble copies from their Greek originals in bronze, yet it was not recognized until 1878[2] that the Roman marble copy from Vaison-la-Romaine (Roman Vasio) in the British Museum
recreates the lost Polyclitan bronze original[3]. Indeed,
Roman marble copies must have abounded, to judge from the number of recognizable fragments and complete works (including a
The marble Diadumenos from Delos at the National Museum, Athens (right) has the winner's cloak and his quiver laid upon the tree stump, hinting that he is the victor in an archery match, with perhaps an implied reference to Apollo, who was conceived, too, as an idealised youth.
The
Modern reception
A mark of the continuing artistic value placed on the Diadumenos type in the modern era, once it had been reconnected with Polyclitus in 1878, may be drawn from the facts that a copy was among the sculptures ranged on the roof of the National Museum, Athens, when it was completed in 1889[4], and that the Esquiline Venus has sometimes been interpreted as a female version of the diadumenos type (a diadumene, or woman tying a diadem).
Notes
- ^ In Hellenistic times the diadem became a symbol of royalty; in the Polyclitan Diadumenos, however, the action is still a simple tying-on of the winner's headband.
- ^ Adolf Michaelis, 1878. "Tre statue Policlitee", Annali dell'Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica pp 5-30, noted in Haskell and Penny 1981:118, note 11.
- ^ The hands have been lost.
- ^ Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press), p. 107.
References
- Herbert Beck, Peter C. Bol, Maraike Bückling (Hrsg.): Polyklet. Der Bildhauer der griechischen Klassik. Ausstellung im Liebieghaus-Museum Alter Plastik Frankfurt am Main. Von Zabern, Mainz 1990 ISBN 3-8053-1175-3
- Detlev Kreikenbom: Bildwerke nach Polyklet. Kopienkritische Untersuchungen zu den männlichen statuarischen Typen nach polykletischen Vorbildern. "Diskophoros", Hermes, Doryphoros, Herakles, Diadumenos. Mann, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-7861-1623-7
External links
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