Wrestlers (sculpture)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Wrestlers — also known as The Two Wrestlers , The Uffizi Wrestlers or The Pancrastinae — is a famous Roman marble sculpture after a lost Greek original of the third century BCE, now in the Uffizi collection in Florence, Italy
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 "Mixed Martial Arts". 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 heads were added after the sculpture was rediscovered.
The group are considered to be finest quality Roman copies of a lost bronze. Not every 20th-century viewer admired "a work once famous and now unfairly neglected", as Sir Kenneth Clark said of it: "If we can bring our eyes to rest on the unpleasant surface of a somewhat lifeless replica, we discover that the original must have been a Lysippic bronze of masterly complexity and condensation." (Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form 1956:245); the sculpture has since been cleaned of its former somewhat oily patina.
The sculpture has previously been variously attributed to Myron, Cephisodotus the Younger or Heliodorus - the last two are mentioned by Pliny as creators of a sculptural format called symplegmata, signifying sculptures of figures closed in struggle, whether purely physical or amatory. Pliny's Natural History 36.35, described the much-admired symplegma of Pan and Plympos in the Portico of Octavia; see Jerome Jordan Politt, Art in the Hellenistic Age 1986:130f. 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 given here follows Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 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. Philippe Magnier produced a marble copy of the group ca 1684-87 for the gardens of Versailles - it was later moved to Marly, and is now in the Louvre.
