A Roman take on Polykleitos

The sculptor Polykleitos made his statue of a discus thrower out of bronze. The marble head in Berlin, broken off at the neck from a full-length body now lost, numbers among the Roman-period copies which explicitly reproduce the qualities of the original bronze. One such telltale trait is the incised outlining of the facial features: the line at the edges of the lips imitates the juncture where the bronze flesh of the face met the copper inlay of the mouth. Likewise, the circles traced around the irises reflect the original bronze’s inlaid eyes. Even the eyelids and eyebrows are sharply defined, these latter recalling the inlaid copper eyebrows which lent an additional touch of colour to bronze statues. The handling of the hair also imitates bronze technique with its fine chasing. Closely following the Polykleitan original in these respects, the Roman artist of the Hadrianic period nonetheless reinterpreted the model in one major respect: by adding two wings to the head, he gave it a new identity as Hermes or Hypnos.
The theory that the original Polykleitan subject was a discus thrower stems from a copy considered quite close to the original and now in the Museo Torlonia in Rome. Holding a discus in his left hand, the athlete of Polykleitos differs from that of Myron – already famous in the ancient period – in that he is not shown winding up for the throw. Rather, he embodies a formula that the sculptor had apparently already conceived for his early work: the image of the nude athlete at rest. The head is structured around strong verticals and a smooth but pronounced curve to the cheeks. The mouth, nose, and eyes lie close together, but are not yet connected in the clearly proportioned facial structure seen in the head of the Doryphoros two decades later. While the hair on the Doryphoros spirals outward from the center, giving it the characteristic “pinwheel” on the back of the head, the discus thrower’s hair is arrayed in a rich play of curls. They nestle closely against the head and grow thicker at the temples, the lunate locks abutting and overlapping each other like a tile roof. In contrast to other copies of the head, the “pincer” locks over the forehead are very small; the sculptor seems to have taken care to avoid any repetitive pattern of locks across the forehead and temples.