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Portrait Statues.

Pausanias mentions the monuments of several victors at Olympia who were entitled to portrait statues on the strength of Pliny’s rule, though we have no indication that they were so honored. Thus he mentions the statues of Dikon,510 Sostratos,511 Philinos,512 and Gorgos.513 The early fifth-century boxer Euthymos514 also won three victories, but at a time before we should expect a portrait statue. The Periegete also mentions several victors who won three or more times, though he does not say that they had any statues, portrait or otherwise.515 Percy Gardner516 has shown how erroneous is the prevailing view that the Greeks neglected portraiture in their art and left it for the Romans to develop. He shows that Greek artists of the third and second centuries B.C. left a great many portraits of the highest artistic value and that portraits of Romans before the time of Augustus, and the best Roman examples during the Empire, were made by Greek sculptors. The number of Greek portraits in our museums, especially in Rome, is very great.517 From archaic times down to the middle of the fifth century B.C. we should not expect portraiture. In the earlier period, therefore, it is difficult to distinguish between statues of gods and those of men. In the great period of Greek art, from the time of Perikles on to that of Alexander, the general tendency of Greek sculpture was so ideal that portraits, when they existed, seem impersonal. The later copyists of portraits also idealized them. Thus Pliny, in speaking of Kresilas’ portrait of Perikles, says that this artist nobiles viros nobiliores fecit—in other words, that he idealized them.518 The portraits of Alexander were especially idealized. In the first half of the fourth century we first hear of realistic portraiture. Thus Demetrios, who flourished 380–360 B.C.,519 made a “very beautiful” statue of a Corinthian general named Pelichos, which Lucian520 says had a fat belly, bald head, hair floating in the wind, and prominent veins, “like the man himself.”521 Except for the hair this description by the satirist seems to have been correct. At the end of the fourth century B.C. anatomical detail began to be shown in sculpture. Largely under the influence of Lysippos, the personality of victors began to be emphasized in figure and face in a very realistic way. We can distinguish between such portraits of victors before and after the time of Lysippos.522 Pliny523 says that Lysistratos, the brother of Lysippos, was the first to obtain portraits by making a plaster mould on the features and so to render likenesses exactly, as “previous artists had only tried to make them as beautiful as possible.” In any case, by the time of Lysippos realistic portraiture began to be emphasized. We see it at Olympia in the later bronze pancratiast’s head found there (Fig. 61, A and B), and in a still more revolting style in the Seated Boxer of the Museo delle Terme (Pl. ssss1, and Fig. ssss1).

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