Phradmon

Phradmon[1] (Gr. Φράδμων) was a little-known sculptor from Argos,[2] whom Pliny places as the contemporary of Polykleitos, Myron, Pythagoras, Scopas, and Perelius, at Olympiad 90 in 420 BC,[3] in giving an anecdotal description of a competition for a Wounded Amazon for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus: in Pliny's anecdote, the fifth place was won by Phradmon, whom Pliny admits was younger than any of the four who were preferred to him.[4] Trusting in Pliny's anecdote, scholars have often hopefully assigned the "Lansdowne" type of Wounded Amazon to Phradmon.

Adolf Furtwängler[5] identified the obscure Phradmon as a follower of Polykleitos, but Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway made a case for Phradmon's being a fourth-century sculptor, in which case, for those who are convinced, "the possibility of contemporaneity collapses and with it the entire anecdote of the contest".[6]

Pausanias mentions his statue of the Olympic victor Amertas of Elis,[7] and there is an epigram attributed to Theodoridas of Syracuse, in the Greek Anthology,[8] on a group of twelve bronze cows, made by Phradmon and dedicated to Athena Itonia, that is, Athena as worshiped at Iton in Thessaly,[9] after an Illyrian campaign in 356 or 336 BCE. Phradmon is also mentioned by Columella.[10]

In 1969 three statue bases were discovered at Ostia Antica, one of which hsad supported a statue of a certain Charite, priestess at Delphi, made by Phradmon of Argos; the inscriptions' form dates them to the first century BCE, suggesting that the sculptures had been re-erected on new bases repeating their former inscription.[11]

References

  1. ^ Sometimes corrupted as Phragmon
  2. ^ Smith, Philip (1867), "Phradmon", in Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1, Boston, pp. 63, http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-bio/0072.html 
  3. ^ Pliny the Elder, Natural History xxxiv. 8. s. 19, according to the reading of the Bamberg manuscript; the common text places all these artists at Olympiad 87
  4. ^ "quamquam diversis aetatibus geniti"
  5. ^ Furtwängler, Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik, Berlin 1893:286-303.
  6. ^ Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, "A Story of Five Amazons", American Journal of Archaeology, 78.1 (January 1974:1-17) pp 2,
  7. ^ Pausanias, Description of Greece vi. 8. § 1
  8. ^ Greek Anthology ix. 743
  9. ^ Compare Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. Ἴτων
  10. ^ Columella, De Re Rustica x. 30
  11. ^ Ridgway 1974:9.

This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1870).