Discobolus by Myron (Ancient Greek Art)

In approximately(prenominal) history, and above all in the history of art, there ar two main aspects, from which the subject whitethorn be considered. The subject whitethorn be either studied from the point of view of global tendencies, the development of types and ideas, their national character, and the circumstances that surrounded and fostered their growth or attention may be give to the achievements of individuals, their personality, and the contri howeverions that they respectively made to the familiar progress.It is true that in any comprehensive study the two essential be blended, must supplement and confirm each other. Which ever principle is followed to guide the selection and arranging of the facts, the study buns non follow it to the entire exclusion of the other. Yet the creative person is no less dependent upon external circumstances for the occasion and the material of his piddles.Had non the predecessors worked through generations of experiment and ru mination to improve the familiar types, to attain statement eitherwhere the stubborn substance of marble and bronze, and to acquire and perfect a skilled technique in the treatment of the au naturel(predicate) and of drapery, no sculpturer of the peerless-fifth century could have conceived or executed the bold up to now symmetrical contortions of the Discobolus. Had Myron been born a century earlier, he could no ofttimes have produced these workings than if he had lived at the present day.Before the study approaches the work of this individual master, it may be advisable to take a to a corkinger extent general survey of the character of Greek sculpture, as contrasted with earlier and posterior styles. No art, and oddly that of sculpture, can stumble true progress unless it is endlessly kept in touch with nature by observation. Here again the social surroundings of the Greek artist gave him an immense advantage over all others. The daily exercises in the palaestra or gymnasium and the oftentimes recurring gymnastic festivals gave him constant opportunities for observing the human form both(prenominal) in rest and in action.This perfection of condition and of all-round knock-down(a) development with the help of a well-trained memory is one of the chief attainments of Myron. For the observation of drapery, too, he had constant opportunities in the figures that surrounded him in daily life. on that point he could see a variety and grace of texture and of folds such(prenominal) as no draping of a model in unfamiliar g sleeveents and materials could ever have suggested. It is true that the comparable opportunities for varied observation did non exist in the case of the nude female figure.It is perhaps for this very reason that Greek statues of this type, however beautiful in form, r arly if ever come across us with the same breadth and nobility of conception as the besides male figures, whether of gods or men. The feeling of the Gre eks themselves ab go forth the matter is well illustrated by the story of Zeuxis at Croton , how the people of that town, when they commissioned him to paint a picture of Helen, and wished to give him every opportunity for excelling himself in such a subject, allowed him to see a selection of the most beautiful of their maidens just as freely as he could see their brothers exercising in the palaestra.This is manifestly the meaning of the story, though it is misinterpreted by some later authorities in accordance with the eclectic spirit of their own age. Myron was a Greek statue maker. He is supposed to have been a pupil of Ageladas of Argos, exclusively he worked generally in Athens. Sculpting in bronze, he was noned for his animals (of which no examples have survived) and for his athletes in action. His works atomic number 18 existn through descriptions by antiquated writers, such as Pliny and Pausanias, and two of them by copies, the Discobolus (Gr. discus thrower), the be st copy of which is the Lancelotti Discobolus in Rome (Terme Museum), and Athena and Marsyas, of which there are in addition Roman copies . We know exactly little about Myrons life. He was a primaeval of Eleutherae, a town on the frontier of Attica and Boeotia. To judge from the list of his works and the places where they were set up, he must have enjoyed a reputation throughout Hellenic lands. The statues of athletic victors from his hand could be seen at Olympia and at Delphi. However, several of his most noted works were in Athens, and it is probable that his dainty career was mainly associated with that city.He is recorded, however, to have been a pupil of the Argive sculptor Ageladas, who was for a long time the acknowledged leader of the Peloponnesian shallow of athletic sculpture and it is said that his fellow-pupils were Phidias and Polyclitus. The dates of Myrons artistic career can be fixed with certainty by the Olympiads of the victors whose statues he made Lycinus won in 448 B. C. , and Timanthes in 456 Ladas probably in 476 but so famous an athlete may have had a statue set up in his honor some long time after the even offt.The traditional date given by Pliny, which makes Myron a contemporary of Polyclitus, is evidently wrong. His son Lycius was employed on an important public commission, the statues set up by the knights of Athens at the entrance to the Acropolis, about 446 B. C. We must, therefore, assign the artistic activity of Myron himself to the first one-half of the fifth century. His early manhood must have coincided with the period of the Iranian wars. Of the corking men of this period, our knowledge, after all, is most unsatisfactory.Only one of the transitional sculptors who are mentioned by ancient writers, Myron, has a definite personality. He was sluttishly an artist of decidedly individual tendencies, who can hardly be called typical of any school. Though all of Myrons works have perished, we have copies of at least two of them, from which we can gain a fairly clear idea of this ancient master. This is the first time that we have had to deal with copies, and it may be worthwhile, therefore, to digress for a moment and consider the nature of the copies on which much of our knowledge of ancient sculpture depends.In the later days of antiquity, especially after the Roman conquest of Greece, there was evidently an enormous command for reproductions of the famous works of Greek sculpture, and numerous artists devoted themselves to supplying this demand. some(a) seem to reproduce their originals with considerable exactness others are obviously furthermost inferior to them. Often one copy was made from another, and sometimes the copyists did not hesitate to alter the originals in details, so that many of their productions are reflections kind of than copies, in any exact sense. maven very common alteration was the adjunct of a support in the form of a tree-stump or some other object. This was almost alw ays employed when the copyist, as frequently happened, was working out a marble copy of a bronze original. Moreover, cut up ancient statues, when they were dug out of the ground, were comm sole(prenominal) reach over to a marble-worker for restoration, that is, for the addition of legs or passports or noses, whatever, in fact, was necessary to make the statue complete.Thus, we have constantly to keep in mind that in traffic with copies, the problem often is to determine, from several widely divergent and differently restored copies, the general appearing and the details of an ancient statue. This method of procedure is excellently illustrated by the most famous of Myrons works, the Discobolus, or Discus-thrower. The copies of this, which have been found, vary greatly in details. All are marred by the supporting tree-stump, though this was differently treated by different copyists.Only one has a head, which has neer been broken off and which shows the original position, as it i s described by Lucian. One fragmentary copy was completely misunderstood by the sculptor to whom it was handed over and restored as a fleeing Niobid The Discobolus is justly famous for its splendid touch of vigorous manhood, its bold pose, and its perfect balance. If it were not for the formal locks of hair, the rather expressionless face, and some ancient evidence, which fixes the career of Myron in the first half of the fifth century, the statue mightiness well be regarded as a work of the great age of Greek sculpture.As it is, we must probably assign the original to the years just before 450, and regard the unusual freedom with which it is conceived as deduction of the originality of Myron rather than as evidence of a general adoption of such active poses by the men of the transitional time. Such an inference is borne out by some other works of the master, such as his stem of Athena and Marsyas, and especially his Ladas, a statue of a runner poised on tiptoe just as he reach ed the goal, a work of which only literary accounts are preserved.Moreover, down to the time of Alexander the Great such violent action as is suggested by these works was rarely represented by the Greek sculptors. These particular innovations, therefore, were little imitated by Myrons contiguous successors, but there can be little doubt that much of the progress made during the transitional period was due to his initiative. In recompense for this cooling of ancient enthusiasm, we may perhaps extenuate the one failing noted by the ancients. He was accounted a master of conformation and action, but weak in the rendering of the face.Conceding that the faces are not very communicative, it may be doubted whether this is altogether a weakness. It is questionable whether the athletes whom he represents were very expressive of countenance, and it is altogether certain that their faces were not the subject of chief attention. In becalm further subordinating facial expression, Myron is but following the great law of concentration, which is recognized in all great art. Probably he could not in any case have been a master of psychic analysis, but it is more than doubtful if his themes would have gained by such mastery.Other master of the same theme long betray the same tendency. Myron was the earliest of the great masters of Greek sculpture. That is to say, he was the earliest sculptor whose works appeared, even to critics who were familiar with the whole range of later art, to be admirable alike for the boldness and originality of their design and the skill of their execution, and who was spoken of in the same glimmering with Polyclitus and Lysippus, with Phidias and Praxiteles. Quintilian himself declares that to find fault with the Discobolus argues a lack of appreciation of art.The Dorian sculptor Myron specialized in athletes. A marble copy found in Rome demonstrates the way a sculptor may at the same time hold to conventions and reach out toward new forms. The Discus ceramicist is really designed to be seen only from the front. Anyone who moves around to the side of this forgather can see that it is all on a flat plane. The general line of the figure, which starts with the left foot and runs up through the arms, ending in the discus, suggests somewhat the tension of an opened spring, which will snap shut and set off the wheel into space.The muscles appear about as natural as those in the contemporary Olympian pediment sculpture, and yet this is a one figure. Up to that time, single figures had always some religious significance and therefore remained columnar or geometric. This one is frankly realistic and may have been made comely much for its own sake. It was no new departure in art for Myron to represent an athlete practicing the exercise in which he excelled. His great attainment, as exemplified by the Discobolus, was the choice of a subject and a moment that was satisfactory to representation in sculpture.He appears to have been the first to realize the principle, never later on violated in Greek sculpture of the best period, that a statue or a sculptural group must be complete in itself, must possess a certain unity and concentration, so as to attract and contain the interest of the spectator within the work itself, and not to direct it to other extraneous objects, nor even to allow it to wander away. In the Discobolus, the self-contained completeness in the action finds its expression and counterpart in the lines of the bit itself.It may be, as Quintilian says, labored and contorted, but the result is not, as might have been expected, restless in effect or tiring to the eye, because every part is in harmony with the whole, and the eye is carried on by an scant(p) and pleasing succession of outlines round the whole contour of the figure . Beside this probity of artistic composition, the clever choice of the right moment for representation and of an athletic exercise in which such a moment occurs m ust also be allowed their merit.The disc or quoit was not aimed at any mark, but merely hurled as far as possible in a given direction, as in the modern competitions of putting the weight or throwing the hammer. Therefore, there was no need for the eye of the competitor to be turn towards a distant goal, but the head could follow the motion of the arm that swung the quoit, the position of the feet sufficing to define the direction of the throw.A false restoration, which makes the thrower turn his head toward this direction, not only produces a painful and even impossible attitude, but also destroys the harmony of the composition, by breaking in upon the system of concentric curves in which every member of the body follows the swing of the extended arm. Athleticism, however, gave one important thing to the Greeks. It was from the models in the palaestra and the stadium that the sculptors of Greece drew their inspiration.It was of line of products an immense benefit to that art to be able to see the plain body at exercise in the sunlight, and that, coupled with the natural Greek sense of form, is the secret of the unchallenged supremacy of Greek sculpture. Perfect anatomy of the body was achieved even before the face could be properly rendered. The nude male figure was the favorite theme of fifth-century art, and extraordinary perfection was reached by Myron. Myrons Discobolus is, of course, one of the best known of ancient statues. There are few statues of the fifth century, which thus select an instant out of a series of movements.In the Discobolus, the clear lines of demarcation are not inconsistent with a correct and skilful modeling of the surface. The effect is perhaps somewhat dry, and suggests the appearance of a man in hard training, and even the tension of muscles that would not be exerted at the moment of action is portrayed. However, what convention is left is so thoroughly harmonized with the results of fresh observation as to give the painting of a living body, and to justify the criticism applied to Myron by ancient critics, that he almost captured the souls of men and animals in his bronzes .