Apollonius, Boxer at Rest, c. 100 B.C.E.

Apollonius, Boxer at Rest, c. 100 B.C.E., bronze, Palazzo Massimo, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome

almost always when we are looking at greek sculpture

we re looking at roman carvings, we aare looking at marble copies

of what had once been bronze. but bronze is

expensive.and it is reusable. so 2000 years

after these objects were made, there is ample

opportunity for it to be melted down.but

once in a while we find a greek original. we are

looking at the seated boxer, a greek helenistic

sculpture from about 100B.C. now helenitic

refers tothis period after alexander the great,

so this is the last phase of the ancient greek art.

because the helenistic ends when the romans

conquer greece. Because it is bronze we have an opportunity to understand

how the greeks constructed their flarge scale

sculpture. This is lost-wax casting and it would be chased, so

you could actually carve into portions,

and we can see that especially in the beard, and in the hair

so those lines would cut into the surface

So this sculpture is hollow in other words. 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 that are missing. they would have been

of ivory or some sort of glass paste, something reflective, well

polished yes we can see that this is quite thin and that if we knocked on it,

it would ring like a bell. a few moments ago

as we were looking at it, there was someone standing

in the veryplace that he seems to be looking

and i almost thought likehe was in actual dialogue with someone

he has a tremendous sense of presence. doesn't he?

he does. during the helenistic period we

see the real expansion of the subject matter that we usually think of

as Greek art. Usually we think about ideal beautiful

nude athletic young, figures. but this is

an athletic figure, but he is not young and

he is not beautiful in the traditional sense

When I look at him I find parts of him beautiful,

but his face is certainly not. Oh, the beauty

comes from our understanding of his life, of his suffering

instead of the elegance and perfection of

his body. He's muscular, he's powerful, but he's defeated

Yeah, there's definitely sense of pathos, the sculpture engages us

emotionally. the artist has been careful

to make sure that we feel sympathy. he has

inlaid copper into parts of the face wher he

has defined wounds, so that the copper

functions as a more red color against the bronze,

and we can see him bleeding. 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

and when I said before I still find him ideally beautiful

i was thinking about the incredible muscles in his torso

he's still really thin and athletic but the face

is such a contrast, and also his hands are

wrapped in leather.the face and the hands ground him

in a kind of reality of a moment. well 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 is looking up but you can feel the exhaustion.

you can also say 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

We rarely see seated figures. In the classical

period in Greek art the figures are standing, they're noble, they exist

in a world, you know, in a heroic way. Just by virtue of just being seated there's humility

and humanity to the figure. Well there's also an informality.

his right leg is out and up on the heel

his left leg is splaid out slightly under the weight of his arm

this is a man who'd like to lie down.

so this is a period in Greek art when there really is an interest in pathos,

in moving beyond the heroic, in moving beyond the traditional subjects of the ancient world

And it's really beginning to expore of much wider variety

It's facinating, it is this incredibly sophisticated moment