Überlegungen zum Œuvre Polyklets

Abstract

The reflections presented here draw on more than 50 sculptures that are considered by researchers to derive from two lost bronze statues by the hand of Polykleitos, a Herakles and an Amazon. The corpus of copies and variants of both statue types is generally taken to include a number of pieces that differ distinctly from the principal corpus. While thus far the attempt has been made to play down the deviations and ascribe them to Roman imperial sculptors, here we put forward the conjecture that the mentioned statues derive not from two, but from four works by Polykleitos, with two pairs of individuals which must have been very similar in certain points. For instance, a certain postural motif, the hand laid on the back, seems to occur multiple times in the œuvre of the Argive sculptor; and also the characteristic coiffure of the famous Polykleitan Amazon was used a second time, in only slightly modified form, for a figure with completely different content. The differences that exist between a large-format head type mainly attested in herms and a small-format statue type are, on the other hand, so marginal that the explanation for them cannot be that Polykleitos created two versions of the same subject, one life-sized and the other in statuette format. In this case one must instead assume the creation – at a time that cannot be precisely determined – of a small-format ›intermediate version‹ that was cast and then frequently copied.