Myron, the sculptor
Myron came from Eleutherai and, like Polykleitos, was a pupil of the sculptor Agelades. Pliny the Elder, who discusses him among the great bronze sculptors, lists his most famous pieces: a heifer so admired that poets wrote verses about it, a dog, a Perseus, a satyr, a Herakles, athletes, and the Discobolus. He also gives a mixed judgement. Myron, he says, was the first to vary the art widely, made more designs than Polykleitos and paid more attention to symmetry; yet he neglected expression, and treated the hair no better than the sculptors of earlier, rougher times.
How do we know which statue it was?
No Roman copy carries Myron’s name. The identification rests on a passage of the Greek writer Lucian. One of his characters mentions a statue and another assumes he means “the discus-thrower”, the one “bent over in the position of the throw, with his head turned back toward the hand that holds the discus”, which is one of Myron’s works. When a marble athlete matching that description came out of the ground in Rome in 1781, the antiquarian Carlo Fea identified it as a copy of Myron’s statue.
That copy, known after its owners as the Massimo or Lancellotti Discobolus, is still the key piece of evidence. Of all the surviving copies of the type, it is the only one complete with its own ancient head, and the head looks back at the discus.
The pose
The athlete is caught at the top of his backswing. His right arm, holding the discus, swings up behind him; his torso bends forward and twists towards it; the left foot trails, touching the ground with its toes. Myron chose the one instant when everything is held in place, so the statue can stand still and still look like movement.
The face stays calm while the body works at full stretch. Pliny’s complaint about expression points the same way: Myron put the action into the body, not into the features. The athlete is naked, as Greek athletes competed, so nothing hides the movement of the muscles.
A famous copy with the wrong head
The Discobolus also shows how copies can mislead. In 1791 a second headless torso was dug up at Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli. The dealer Thomas Jenkins had it restored by Carlo Albacini, who fitted an antique head of matching marble, and sold it to the collector Charles Townley for £400. Jenkins insisted the head had been found beside the torso. Townley noticed that it faced outwards instead of looking back at the discus, as on the Massimo statue, and asked why; the papal antiquary Visconti replied with a theory that the Massimo pose was “forced” and that Townley’s sculptor had improved on Myron.
The head was not original. Richard Payne Knight published it as a foreign addition in 1809, yet the British Museum, which bought the Townley marbles in 1805, still denied the fact in 1861. Worse, when a third torso from the same villa was restored for the Vatican, Visconti modelled its new head on Townley’s statue rather than on the Massimo one. A wrong restoration became a model in its own right.
Bronze original, marble copies
Myron made the statue in bronze, a material strong enough to hold an outstretched arm and a body balanced on one foot. The marble copies needed supports that the original did not. Compare the Discobolus with the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, made a few years later: one shows a body in action, the other a body at rest, and both are known only through Roman marble.
Where to see it
The Lancellotti Discobolus is in the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome. The Townley Discobolus is on display in Room 1 of the British Museum in London, and the Vatican copy with its borrowed pose is in the Vatican Museums. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- British Museum, collection record 1805,0703.43, “The Townley Diskobolos”, with curator’s comments (M. Jones 1990; B. Cook 2013).
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.57-58, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library).
- Lucian, The Lover of Lies 18, trans. A. M. Harmon, quoted in J. Grout, Encyclopaedia Romana (University of Chicago).
