Head of a God or Poet, 100 -- 1 B.C.E. Photo: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, museum purchase funded by Isabel B. and Wallace S. Wilson.
Posted on 12/12/2015 9:50:16 PM PST by SunkenCiv
In 1964, Italian fishermen off the coast of the Adriatic Sea pulled out of international waters a nearly complete, life-size ancient bronze statue of an athlete. Standing with his weight on his right leg, the nude athlete reaches with his right arm toward the wreath on his head. Victorious in his competition, he will take off his crown and dedicate it to the gods.
"The round face, with wide-set eyes, small nose, motionless cheeks, and petite, pointed chin appears somewhat vacuous," writes Jens M. Daehner of the Victorious Athlete. "The face subtly conveys a state of exhaustion, a situational realism oddly conditioned by the idealized rendering of the rather generic features."
This rare bronze statue is one of about 50 sculptures featured in Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, a new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Showcasing bronze statues from the Hellenistic-period (fourth -- first centuries B.C.E.)...
That these Hellenistic bronzes have survived over two millennia is mostly by chance. Bronze was commonly melted down and reused, such that fewer than 200 bronzes statues from the Hellenistic period exist today. Many of the sculptures were recovered from the bottom of the sea -- casualties of shipwrecks or scuffles at sea. Others were unintentionally preserved in the aftermath of natural disasters, such as the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E.
(Excerpt) Read more at biblicalarchaeology.org ...
Head of a God or Poet, 100 -- 1 B.C.E. Photo: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, museum purchase funded by Isabel B. and Wallace S. Wilson.
December 13, 2015 -- March 20, 2016, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Boy is that beautiful.
Heavy, man.
That piece of a god or poet is stunning.
I may not often post on your threads, but I do enjoy reading the ones most relevant to my teaching.
I like to think that he really lived and looked like that, and wasn’t ‘idealized’. He’s very beautiful.
-JT
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