An arm in the sand
On 16 August 1972 a diver from Rome, Stefano Mariottini, was swimming about 200 metres off the beach of Riace Marina, on the Ionian coast of Calabria. At a depth of about eight metres he saw an arm rising from the sand. Digging around it, he found a second figure close by. Within days a team of police divers raised both statues: Bronze B came up on 21 August and Bronze A the next day.
The statues were complete but covered in sand and sea concretions. They went to Florence for restoration, where the cleaning took years, and were shown in Florence and Rome before returning to Calabria in 1981. Crowds queued for hours to see them. They have been restored twice since, in 1992-95 and 2009-11.
Two warriors, two styles
Both statues show a naked bearded warrior, nearly two metres tall, standing with the weight on one leg in the relaxed pose the Greeks perfected in the fifth century, known as contrapposto. Each once held a shield on the left arm and a spear in the right hand; both are lost.
Bronze A, the “young man”, has thick curling hair and beard and a head turned sharply to the side. Bronze B, the “old man”, has a narrower head shaped to wear a helmet, now missing, and a softer body. Their details were made in other metals and stones: inlaid eyes, lips and nipples of copper, and in Bronze A silver teeth showing between the parted lips. Greek statues were never meant to be plain bronze-brown, as the colours of painted Greek statues remind us.
Who made them, and who are they?
This is where agreement ends. There is no consensus on who the warriors are, where they stood or who made them. Most scholars think the two were made by different artists, possibly decades apart: some date both to about 460-450 BCE, others place Bronze A around 460 and Bronze B around 430 BCE. Over the years scholars have proposed many names, from famous Athenian sculptors to workshops in southern Italy, and have identified the figures as heroes from a group monument at Delphi, Athens or Argos. None of these proposals has been proven.
What everyone accepts is their quality. They are among the very few life-size Greek bronzes of the Classical period to survive, and they show what Greek sculptors could do with the human body when the material allowed a free stance and fine surface detail. Most Greek bronzes are known only through Roman marble copies, and the gap between the two is one of the clearest ways Greek and Roman sculpture differ.
So how did they end up in the sea?
The most common answer is a ship. In Roman times Greek bronzes were often shipped to Italy as loot or for sale to collectors, and the coast of Calabria lay on the route from Greece. A ship caught in a storm might have sunk, or the crew might have thrown the heavy statues overboard to stay afloat.
But the evidence is thin. Searches in the area have not found a hull, cargo or anchors that clearly belong with the statues, so it is not even certain they sank where they were found. That gap is why the bronzes still raise more questions than they answer, and why every new study of their clay cores and metal is watched closely.
Where to see them
The Riace Bronzes are displayed in a climate-controlled room of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale della Magna Grecia in Reggio Calabria, at the tip of mainland Italy.
Sources
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria, the Riace Bronzes.
- World History Encyclopedia, “Riace Bronzes”.
- Finestre sull’Arte, “The Riace Bronzes: history of the two masterpieces of Greek sculpture” and “August 16, 1972-2022”.
