Wrestlers (sculpture)

Sculpture


title = The Wrestlers
artist = Anon.
year = 3rd century BCE original
type = White marble
height =
inch =
city = Florence
museum = Uffizi

"The Wrestlers" (sometimes known as "the Two Wrestlers" or "the Uffizi Wrestlers") is a famous Roman marble sculptural group after a lost Greek original of the third century BCE, now in the Uffizi collection.

Description, style and authorship

The two young men are engaged in the sport called "Pankration", a kind of wrestling similar to the present-day sport of "Greco-Roman wrestling". The two figures are clutching one another, and one seems to have the upper hand, holding the other knelt down and twisting his arm back. Their muscular structure is very defined and exaggerated due to their physical and sustained effort.

Neither of the two heads are original to the group, though that of the lower figure is older and is as advanced sylistically as the sons in the "Niobe Group". [The head of the lower youth is antique, though not belonging to this sculpture; the other youth's head has been modelled to complement it. (Haskell and Penny 1981:337).] The heads were probably added later - the style is typical of the free restoration done in Roman Republican period, when fragments were added to other fragments regardless of whether or not the two were anatomically matched.

The group are considered to be finest quality Roman copies of a lost bronze. The sculpture has previously been attributed to Miro, Cephisodotus the Younger and Heliodorus - the last two are mentioned by Pliny as creators of a sculptural called “symplegmata” (ie groups that connect closely with each other). Currently the sculpture is considered to be the best quality Roman copy from a lost original Hellenistic bronze of the third century BCE, either of the Pergamene school or the circle of Lysippus.

Rediscovery

The discovery of "The Wrestlers" caused such an immediate sensation among the "cognoscenti" of Rome, that the event can be dated to the very end of March or beginning of April 1583, in a "vigna" belonging to the Tommasini da Gallese family near Porta San Giovanni, Rome, together with the group of individual sculptures called the "Niobids". Circumstances of their discovery, and the fact that the heads were missing, led early antiquarians— and the engravers who worked to their direction— to group the paired figures with these "Niobids".

Within days of their excavation, Valerio Cioli, a sculptor and restorer of Roman antiquities in Rome, was writing to the secretary of Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, to alert his patron to the discovery, and the Medici lost no time: on 25 June the group, and the "Niobids" were purchased from a member of the Varese family, who had managed to gain possession of them in the intervening weeks, by the Grand Duke's brother (and eventual heir) Ferdinando Cardinal de' Medici, who took it to add to the outstanding gallery of antiquities at Villa Medici. There it was illustrated in an engraving of 1594. [The early history of the sculpture follows Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, "Taste and the Antique: the lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900" (Yale University Press) 1981: p 337f.] From there it has come to reside in the Galerie degli Uffizi, with the rest of the Medici collections, where it was a main feature of the Tribuna of the Uffizi.

The sculpture has been reproduced in marble, bronze and plaster, and in modern times cast in resin, both in full size and in miniature, and the subject in general was treated by Michelangelo. [ [http://www.scultura-italiana.com/Galleria/Michelangelo/imagepages/image16.html Michelangelo - Due lottatori (Firenze, Casa Buonarroti, 1530ca.).jpg] ] Philippe Magnier produced a marble copy of the group in ca 1684-87 for the gardens of Versailles - it was later moved to Marly, and is now in the Louvre.

Notes

ources

* [http://www.museoomero.it/main?p=collezione_sculturagreca_ilottatori&idLang=4 Museo Mero (in Italian)]