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Accordingly, since only victors who had won three or more contests at Olympia could set up iconic statues, the great majority of statues there represented some ideal type of common applicability, in which there was no attempt to show the individual features of this or that victor, but rather the typical athlete of muscular build. The older statues were merely variations of a few types which were held to be appropriate to the purpose. In process of time these few types in their treatment of details gradually approached truth to nature; this was especially characteristic of the Peloponnesian schools, which adopted the Doryphoros of Polykleitos as their norm of proportions. Statues of victors were the stock subject of the closely related schools of Argos and Sikyon.533 Doubtless, as E. A. Gardner says,534 there existed at Olympia itself a school of subordinate artists, who filled the regular demand for victor statues. However, some of these statues, especially those of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., as we see them in originals and in Roman copies, and read the æsthetic judgments of them in Greek writers, were real works of art.