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49-523: The Wrestlers (also known as The Two Wrestlers , The Uffizi Wrestlers or The Pancrastinae ) is a Roman marble sculpture after a lost Greek original of the third century BCE. It is now in the Uffizi collection in Florence , Italy. The two young men are engaged in the pankration , a kind of wrestling similar to the present-day sport of mixed martial arts . The two figures are wrestling in

98-616: A bronze head supposedly of Lucius Junius Brutus is very variously dated, but taken as a very rare survival of Italic style under the Republic, in the preferred medium of bronze. Similarly stern and forceful heads are seen in the coins of the consuls, and in the Imperial period coins as well as busts sent around the Empire to be placed in the basilicas of provincial cities were the main visual form of imperial propaganda; even Londinium had

147-416: A great deal of Roman sculpture, especially in stone, survives more or less intact, it is often damaged or fragmentary; life-size bronze statues are much more rare as most have been recycled for their metal. Most statues were actually far more lifelike and often brightly colored when originally created; the raw stone surfaces found today is due to the pigment being lost over the centuries. Early Roman art

196-579: A near-colossal statue of Nero , though far smaller than the 30-metre-high Colossus of Nero in Rome, now lost. The Tomb of Eurysaces the Baker , a successful freedman ( c.  50 –20 BC) has a frieze that is an unusually large example of the "plebeian" style. The Romans did not generally attempt to compete with free-standing Greek works of heroic exploits from history or mythology, but from early on produced historical works in relief , culminating in

245-406: A number of styles, by the producing area. "Roman" ones were made to rest against a wall, and one side was left uncarved, while "Attic" and other types were carved on all four sides; but the short sides were generally less elaborately decorated in both types. The time taken to make them encouraged the use of standard subjects, to which inscriptions might be added to personalize them, and portraits of

294-429: A position now known as a "cross-body ride" in modern folkstyle wrestling . The upper wrestler has his left leg entwined with his opponent's left leg, with his body across the opponent's body, lifting the opponent's right arm. In a well-known modern series of wrestling moves, the upper wrestler would now try to lift his opponent's arm above his head to force a pinning move called the " Guillotine ." Their muscular structure

343-535: Is arguably the main strength of Roman sculpture. There are no survivals from the tradition of masks of ancestors that were worn in processions at the funerals of the great families and otherwise displayed in the home, but many of the busts that survive must represent ancestral figures, perhaps from the large family tombs like the Tomb of the Scipios or the later mausolea outside the city. The famous " Capitoline Brutus ",

392-413: Is oddly reticent on the architectural use of sculpture, mentioning only a few examples, though he says that an architect should be able to explain the meaning of architectural ornament and gives as an example the use of caryatids . Ch%C3%A2teau de Marly The Château de Marly ( French pronunciation: [ʃato də maʁli] ) was a French royal residence located in what is now Marly-le-Roi ,

441-549: 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 stylistically 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 art historian Kenneth Clark said of it: "If we can bring our eyes to rest on

490-494: The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Mansart's elevations for the pavilions were to be frescoed to designs adapted from a suite that Le Brun had recently drawn. The frescoed exteriors of the otherwise somewhat severe buildings created a richly Baroque ensemble of feigned sculptures against draperies and hangings, with vases on feigned sculptural therms against the piers — all in the somewhat eclectic Olympian symbolism that Le Brun and

539-694: The Louvre museum was inaugurated in 1993. It contains mostly works of art from Marly, displayed on three levels. Providing a sufficient water supply for the fountains at Versailles had been a problem from the outset. The construction of the Marly hydraulic machine , actually located in Bougival (where its inventor Rennequin Sualem died in 1708), driven by the current of the Seine moving fourteen vast paddle wheels,

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588-520: The Museo di Capodimonte , Naples ). Found in the Gardens of Sallust and the Gardens of Maecenas : Scenes shown on reliefs such as that of Trajan's column and those shown on sarcophogi reveal images of Roman technology now long lost, such as ballistae and the use of waterwheel-driven saws for cutting stone. The latter was only recently discovered at Hieropolis and commemorates the miller who used

637-544: The Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus , and very small sculpture, especially in ivory, was continued by Christians, building on the style of the consular diptych . Portraiture is a dominant genre of Roman sculpture, growing perhaps from the traditional Roman emphasis on family and ancestors; the entrance hall ( atrium ) of a Roman elite house displayed ancestral portrait busts . During the Roman Republic , it

686-470: The commune on the northern edge of the royal park. This was situated west of the palace and garden complex at Versailles. Marly-le-Roi is the town that developed to serve the château , which was demolished in 1806 after passing into private ownership and being used as a factory. The town is now a bedroom community for Paris. At the Château of Marly, Louis XIV of France escaped from the formal rigors he

735-441: The " Great Cameo of France ". For a much wider section of the population, moulded relief decoration of pottery vessels and small figurines were produced in great quantity and often considerable quality. After moving through a late 2nd century "baroque" phase, in the 3rd century, Roman art largely abandoned, or simply became unable to produce, sculpture in the classical tradition, a change whose causes remain much discussed. Even

784-567: The 2nd to the 4th century CE, after a change in Roman burial customs from cremation to inhumation , and were mostly made in a few major cities, including Rome and Athens , which exported them to other cities. Elsewhere the stela gravestone remained more common. They were always a very expensive form reserved for the elite, and especially so in the relatively few very elaborately carved examples; most were always relatively plain, with inscriptions, or symbols such as garlands. Sarcophagi divide into

833-654: The Imperial period were apparently mostly used as garden ornaments; indeed many statues were also placed in gardens, both public and private. Sculptures recovered from the site of the Gardens of Sallust , opened to the public by Tiberius , include: Roman baths were another site for sculpture; among the well-known pieces recovered from the Baths of Caracalla are the Farnese Bull and Farnese Hercules and larger-than-life-sized early 3rd century patriotic figures somewhat reminiscent of Soviet Social Realist works (now in

882-524: The King favoured everywhere at Versailles. The decor of the pavillon du Roi featured Apollo , the Sun King's iconographic persona, and Thetis . Other pavilions were dedicated to other Olympians, but also to Hercules , and to Victory , Fame and Abundance . Construction was completed by 1684, though the overcharged painted programmes were simplified and restrained in the execution. The Sun King attended

931-553: 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,

980-420: The archaeological record, particularly in the provinces , and indicate that these were a continual presence in the lives of Romans, whether for votives or for private devotional display at home or in neighborhood shrines. These typically show more regional variation in style than large and more official works, and also stylistic preferences between different classes. Roman marble sarcophagi mostly date from

1029-536: The base of the Column of Antoninus Pius (161), Campana reliefs were cheaper pottery versions of marble reliefs and the taste for relief was from the imperial period expanded to the sarcophagus. All forms of luxury small sculpture continued to be patronized, and quality could be extremely high, as in the silver Warren Cup , glass Lycurgus Cup , and large cameos like the Gemma Augustea , Gonzaga Cameo and

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1078-423: The château was sold to a private owner. He demolished it in 1806 after his factory there failed. The hydraulic "machine" that pumped water for Versailles was also demolished. Only the foundation of Jules Hardouin-Mansart 's small château the pavillon du Roi remains at the top of the slope in Marly park. Napoleon bought back the estate in 1807, and the park belongs to the state. The works at Marly were begun in

1127-531: The classical tradition". This revolution in style shortly preceded the period in which Christianity was adopted by the Roman state and the great majority of the people, leading to the end of large religious sculpture, with large statues now only used for emperors, as in the famous fragments of a colossal acrolithic statue of Constantine , and the 4th or 5th century Colossus of Barletta . However rich Christians continued to commission reliefs for sarcophagi, as in

1176-409: The deceased were slow to appear. The sarcophagi offer examples of intricate reliefs that depict scenes often based on Greek and Roman mythology or mystery religions that offered personal salvation, and allegorical representations. Roman funerary art also offers a variety of scenes from everyday life, such as game-playing, hunting, and military endeavors. Early Christian art quickly adopted

1225-665: The entire Hellenistic world except for the Parthian far east, official and patrician sculpture became largely an extension of the Hellenistic style, from which specifically Roman elements are hard to disentangle, especially as so much Greek sculpture survives only in copies of the Roman period. By the 2nd century BCE, "most of the sculptors working at Rome" were Greek, often enslaved in conquests such as that of Corinth (146 BCE), and sculptors continued to be mostly Greeks, often slaves, whose names are very rarely recorded. Sculpting

1274-509: The estate the following year; the empty gardens and the surrounding woodland park still belong to the State. At the end of the 19th century, several connoisseurs purchased leases on the individual garçonnières , cleaned up the overgrowth, recovered some bruised and broken statuary and recreated small gardens among the ruins: Alexandre Dumas, fils and the playwright and collector of 18th-century furnishings Victorien Sardou . The Cour Marly of

1323-512: The great Roman triumphal columns with continuous narrative reliefs winding around them, of which those commemorating Trajan (CE 113) and Marcus Aurelius (by 193) survive in Rome, where the Ara Pacis ("Altar of Peace", 13 BCE) represents the official Greco-Roman style at its most classical and refined. Among other major examples are the earlier re-used reliefs on the Arch of Constantine and

1372-607: The ideal than the Greeks or Ancient Egyptians, and produced very characterful works, and in narrative relief scenes. Examples of Roman sculpture are abundantly preserved, in total contrast to Roman painting, which was very widely practiced but has almost all been lost. Latin and some Greek authors , particularly Pliny the Elder in Book 34 of his Natural History , describe statues, and a few of these descriptions match extant works. While

1421-536: The initiation of Marly, at second hand; when Saint-Simon wrote, in 1715, Marly's heyday was ending, with the death of Louis XIV that year. Louis' heirs found the north-facing slope made Marly damp and dreary, and rarely visited. The "river" was filled in and grassed in 1728. During the Revolution the marble horses by Guillaume Coustou the Elder , the Chevaux de Marly , were transported to Paris (1794), to flank

1470-663: The machine. Other reliefs show harvesting machines, much as they were described by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia . Compared to the Greeks, the Romans made less use of stone sculpture on buildings, apparently having few friezes with figures. Important pediments , such as the Pantheon for example, originally had sculpture, but hardly any have survived. Terracotta relief panels called Campana reliefs have survived in good numbers. These were used to decorate interior walls, in strips. The architectural writer Vitruvius

1519-482: The most important imperial monuments now showed stumpy, large-eyed figures in a harsh frontal style, in simple compositions emphasizing power at the expense of grace. The contrast is famously illustrated in the Arch of Constantine of 315 in Rome, which combines sections in the new style with roundels in the earlier full Greco-Roman style taken from elsewhere, and the Four Tetrarchs ( c.  305 ) from

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1568-440: The most magnificent of the surviving statues appear to have been cult images. Roman altars were usually rather modest and plain, but some Imperial examples are modeled after Greek practice with elaborate reliefs, most famously the Ara Pacis , which has been called "the most representative work of Augustan art." Small bronze statuettes and ceramic figurines, executed with varying degrees of artistic competence, are plentiful in

1617-487: The new capital of Constantinople , now in Venice . Ernst Kitzinger found in both monuments the same "stubby proportions, angular movements, an ordering of parts through symmetry and repetition and a rendering of features and drapery folds through incisions rather than modelling... The hallmark of the style wherever it appears consists of an emphatic hardness, heaviness and angularity — in short, an almost complete rejection of

1666-554: The opening of the Champs-Élysées in the soon-to-be-renamed Place de la Concorde (they are now displayed in the Musée du Louvre , along with many other Marly sculptures). In 1799/1800, Marly was sold to an industrialist, M. Sagniel, who installed machinery to spin cotton thread. When the factory failed in 1806, the château was demolished and its building materials sold, including the lead from its roof. Napoleon bought back

1715-618: The opening of the completed hydraulic works in June 1684 and by 1686 development was sufficiently advanced for the King to stay there for the first time, with a selected entourage. The theme of Marly was that it was a simple hunting lodge , just enough to accommodate the Royal Hunt. In 1688 the Grand Abreuvoir à chevaux was installed on the terrace, a mere "horse trough." Throughout the rest of his life, Louis continued to embellish

1764-749: The otherwise unknown deceased carved in relief . Among the many museums with examples of Roman portrait sculpture, the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum in London are especially noteworthy. Religious art was also a major form of Roman sculpture. A central feature of a Roman temple was the cult statue of the deity, who was regarded as "housed" there (see aedes ). Although images of deities were also displayed in private gardens and parks,

1813-673: The outstanding gallery of antiquities at Villa Medici . There it was illustrated in an engraving of 1594. The Wrestlers is now among the Medici collections in the Galerie degli Uffizi . where it was a main feature of the Tribuna of the Uffizi . The sculpture was cleaned of its former somewhat oily patina . 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

1862-598: The sarcophagus, and they are the most common form of early Christian sculpture, progressing from simple examples with symbols to elaborate fronts, often with small scenes of the Life of Christ in two rows within an architectural framework. The Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (c. 359) is of this type, and the earlier Dogmatic Sarcophagus rather simpler. The huge porphyry Sarcophagi of Helena and Constantina are grand Imperial examples. Scenes from Roman sarcophagi A number of well-known large stone vases sculpted in relief from

1911-457: 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 . 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

1960-526: The spring of 1679, on 22 May, before Louis had moved his court permanently to Versailles. The king was looking for a retreat on well-wooded royal lands between Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye that were well-watered and provided a grand view. Marly was chosen. Robert Berger has demonstrated that the design of Marly was a full collaboration between Jules Hardouin-Mansart and the Premier peintre du Roi Charles Le Brun , who were concurrently working on

2009-409: 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 . [REDACTED] Media related to Uffizi wrestlers at Wikimedia Commons Roman sculpture The strengths of Roman sculpture are in portraiture, where they were less concerned with

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2058-509: The unpleasant surface of a somewhat lifeless replica, we discover that the original must have been a Lysippic bronze of masterly complexity and condensation." The sculpture has been attributed variously 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. Currently

2107-488: The wooded park, with wide straight rides, in which ladies or the infirm might follow the hunt, at some distance, in a carriage, and with more profligate waterworks than waterless Versailles could provide: the Rivière or Grande Cascade dates to 1697–1698. Versailles was provided with water from Marly. The famous description of Marly in the memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon were written in retrospect and, for

2156-544: Was a miracle of modern hydraulic engineering , perhaps the largest integrated machine of the 17th century. It pumped water to a head of 100 meters into reservoirs at Louveciennes (where Madame du Barry had her château in the 1760s). The water then flowed either to fill the cascade at Marly or drive the fountains at Versailles — the latter, after passing through an elaborate underground network of reservoirs and aqueducts . The machine could only deliver sufficient pressure to satisfy either Marly or Versailles, and invariably

2205-419: Was considered a sign of character not to gloss over physical imperfections, and to depict men in particular as rugged and unconcerned with vanity: the portrait was a map of experience. During the Imperial era, more idealized statues of Roman emperors became ubiquitous, particularly in connection with the state religion of Rome . Tombstones of even the modestly rich middle class sometimes exhibit portraits of

2254-473: Was constructing at Versailles . Small rooms meant less company, and simplified protocol ; courtiers, who fought among themselves for invitations to Marly, were housed in a revolutionary design of twelve pavilions built in matching pairs flanking the central sheets of water, which were fed one from the other by formalized cascades ( illustration, right ). After the French Revolution , about 1800,

2303-490: Was influenced by the art of Greece and that of the neighbouring Etruscans , themselves greatly influenced by their Greek trading partners . An Etruscan speciality was near life size tomb effigies in terracotta , usually lying on top of a sarcophagus lid propped up on one elbow in the pose of a diner in that period. As the expanding Roman Republic began to conquer Greek territory, at first in Southern Italy and then

2352-404: Was not considered a profession by Romans — at most, it was accepted as a hobby. Vast numbers of Greek statues were imported to Rome, whether as booty or the result of extortion or commerce, and temples were often decorated with re-used Greek works. A native Italian style can be seen in the tomb monuments of prosperous middle-class Romans, which very often featured portrait busts, and portraiture

2401-579: 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

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