Look closely to see bloody wounds and a lifetime of scars on this defeated athlete.
Apollonius, Boxer at Rest, c. 100 B.C.E., bronze, Hellenistic Period (Palazzo Massimo, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:06] Almost always, when we look at Greek sculpture we’re looking at Roman copies, we’re looking at marble copies of what had once been bronze. But bronze is expensive and it’s reusable. And so for the 2000 years since these objects were made, there was ample opportunity for them to be melted down. But once in a while we find a Greek original.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:26] We’re looking at “The Seated Boxer,” a Greek Hellenistic sculpture from about 100 B.C. Now, “Hellenistic” refers to this period after Alexander the Great.
Dr. Zucker: [0:37] This is the last phase of ancient Greek art, because the Hellenistic will end when the Romans conquer Greece. Because it’s bronze, we have an opportunity to understand how the Greeks constructed their large-scale sculpture. This is lost-wax casting, and it would be chased, so you could actually carve into portions. We can see that especially in the beard and in the hair, so those lines are cut into the surface.
Dr. Harris: [1:01] The sculpture is hollow, in other words.
Dr. Zucker: [1:03] We can see that if you look into the eyes, if you look into the mouth; you can see the hollowness. Now, originally there would have been eyes. They’re missing. They probably would have been ivory or some sort of glass paste. Something reflective and highly polished. But yes, we can see that this is quite thin. If we knocked on it, it would ring like a bell.
Dr. Harris: [1:20] A few moments ago, as we were looking at it, there was someone standing in the very place that he seems to be looking, and I almost felt like he was in actual dialogue with someone.
Dr. Zucker: [1:31] He has that tremendous sense of presence, doesn’t he?
Dr. Harris: [1:33] He does. During this Hellenistic period, we see a real expansion of the subject matter that we usually think of as Greek art. Usually, we think about ideal, beautiful, nude, athletic, young figures.
Dr. Zucker: [1:47] Well this is an athletic figure, but he’s not young and he’s not beautiful in the traditional sense.
Dr. Harris: [1:52] When I look at him, I find parts of him beautiful, but his face is certainly not.
Dr. Zucker: [1:58] Well, the beauty comes from our understanding of his life, of his suffering, instead of through the elegance and perfection of his body. He’s muscular. He’s powerful, but he’s defeated.
Dr. Harris: [2:09] Yeah. There’s definitely a sense of pathos. This sculpture engages us emotionally.
Dr. Zucker: [2:14] The artist has been careful to make sure that we feel sympathy. He’s inlaid copper into parts of his face where he’s defined wounds, so that the copper functions almost like as a more red color against the bronze, and we can see him bleeding.
Dr. Harris: [2:29] Boxing in ancient Greece focused mainly on blows to the head, to the face, and that’s why his body looks still so very beautiful and perfect. When I said before I still find him ideally beautiful, I was thinking about the incredible muscles in his torso.
[2:45] He’s still really thin and athletic, but the face is such a contrast. And also, his hands all wrapped in leather. The face and the hands ground him in a kind of reality of a moment.
Dr. Zucker: [2:58] That’s especially true with his posture. You can see that he’s not simply seated. His torso is collapsing, his head is down. He’s looking up, but you can feel the exhaustion.
[3:07] You can also see the way in which his body has been beaten, the broken nose, the gashes in his face, and look at his ear, which is swollen and distorted.
Dr. Harris: [3:19] We rarely see seated figures in the Classical Period in Greek art. The figures are standing, they’re noble, they exist in the world in that heroic way. Just by virtue of just being seated, there’s a humility and humanity to the figure.
Dr. Zucker: [3:35] There’s also an informality. His right leg is out and up on the heel. His left leg is splayed out slightly under the weight of his arm. This is a man who would like to lie down.
[3:45] This is a period in Greek art when there really is an interest in pathos, in moving beyond the heroic, moving beyond the traditional subjects of the ancient world, and really beginning to explore a much wider variety. It’s fascinating. It is this incredibly sophisticated moment.
[4:01] [music]
