Apoxyomenos

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Line drawing of the Vatican Apoxyomenos, from the Nordisk familjebok.
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Line drawing of the Vatican Apoxyomenos, from the Nordisk familjebok.

Apoxyomenos (the "Scraper") is one of the Greek conventions in representing an athlete, caught in the familiar act of scraping sweat and dust from his body with the small curved instrument that the Romans called a strigil.

The most renowned Apoxyomenos in Classical Antiquity was that of Lysippos of Sikyon, the court sculptor of Alexander the Great, made ca 330 BCE. The bronze original is lost, but it is known, in part from its description in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, which relates that the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa installed Lysippos's masterpiece in the Baths of Agrippa that he erected in Rome, around 20 BCE. Later, the emperor Tiberius became so enamored of the figure that he had it removed to his bedroom.[1] However an uproar in the theatre, "Give us back our Apoxyomenos", shamed the emperor into replacing it.

The sculpture is represented by the Pentelic marble copy in the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome, discovered in 1849 when it was excavated in Trastevere. Plaster casts of it soon found their way into national academy collections, and it is the standard version in textbooks. The sculpture, slightly larger than lifesize, is characteristic of the new canon of proportion pioneered by Lysippus, with a slightly smaller head (1:8 of the total height, rather than the 1:7 of Polykleitos) and longer and thinner limbs. Pliny notes a remark that Lysippus "used commonly to say" - that while other artists "made men as they really were, he made them as they appeared to be." Lysippus poses his subject in a true controposto, with an arm outstretched to create a sense of movement and interest from a range of viewing angles.

Pliny also mentioned treatments of this motif by Polykleitos and by his pupil or follower, Daidalos of Sikyon. The Polycleitan type has not been identified with any surviving sculptures or fragments.

A substantially complete bronze Apoxyomenos of a different model, who strigilates his thigh, was recovered from the sea off the Croatian island of Lošinj in 1999; it is currently thought to be a Hellenistic copy of the second or first century BCE. A refined bronze head of an Apoxyomenos of this type had found its way into the collection of Bernardo Nani in Venice in the early eighteenth century (now in the Kimball Art Museum); his lips were originally veneered with copper and his eyes inlaid in glass, stone, and copper. A fragmentary bronze statue of the same type was excavated in 1896 at Ephesus in Turkey (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Another half-dozen fragments of the Croatian/Kimball type suggests that this was the more popular in Antiquity, and that the famous Vatican Apoxyomenos, which reverses the pose, may be a variant of Lysippus' original.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ So Pliny reports. Compare the myth of Pygmalion and the anecdote that was circulating in Rome about an admirer of Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos. Tiberius at least removed the statue to his private palace.

[edit] References

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