UNCLE MONTY, DJANGO & THE WRESTLERS

UNCLE MONTY, DJANGO &THE WRESTLERS

One of my sadder hobbies (OK, I admit that I do jigsaws and Sudoku as well) is spotting appearances of Classical statues in unexpected contexts: advertising, films, television game shows.  Classical statues are used as a form of visual shorthand to convey a message or an atmosphere – for example, the casts of Riace Warrior A in Celebrity Juice are presumably intended to convey ‘decadence’, or at least a Carry On-style naughtiness.  In other modern contexts, Classical sculptures have been used to convey everything from beauty, purity and civilised ‘good taste’ to sexual licence, narcissism, paganism or even fascism.  In this article I’m going to explore how one particular ancient sculpture – the Wrestlers - has been used as a piece of set-dressing to create very different messages in two popular films, Withnail & I and Django Unchained. 

                                   Copy of the Wrestlers in the Hancock Museum, Newcastle

The Wrestlers, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, depicts two Greek athletes competing in the pankration (‘all-powerful’) a form of highly brutal mixed martial arts which was one of the most popular events at the ancient Olympic Games. We can tell that these athletes are pankratiasts because the pankration involved ground wrestling, rather than the normal form of ‘upright’ wrestling.  There were few rules: you were allowed to kick and punch your opponent, and even break their fingers, but not bite them or gouge out their eyes (although there are several images and stories of contestants ignoring these rules).  The statue as we have it – it only survives in a single version from antiquity – is a Roman marble copy of a Greek original from the Hellenistic period.  Further information on the history of the statue is given at the end of this article, if you’re interested. 

One of my favourite scenes in Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987) takes place in Uncle Monty’s house in Chelsea, where Withnail attempts to sweet-talk Monty into lending him his cottage in the Lake District.  Just in case Monty’s exposition about flowers (‘tarts for the bees’) and carrots has left us in any doubt about his sexual preferences, check out the statuette on the table behind the sofa.  It’s a miniature version of the Wrestlers – two naked men engaged in a well-oiled clinch.  This scene was shot in the home of Bernard Nevill, formerly the director of design at Liberty (the house is West House, Chelsea, designed by the Arts & Crafts architect Philip Webb).  I assume that the statue was already part of Professor Nevill’s collection, but here it provides a wonderfully serendipitous piece of characterisation: Uncle Monty might be a cultivated aesthete with an expensive Classical education, but he’s also capable of feeling unrequited lust for a pretty-boy like Marwood (‘I’) – not helped, of course, by Withnail’s hints about Marwood’s own sexual proclivities.  Monty’s presence lends a homoerotic overtone to the Wrestlers, which may or may not have been intended as part of the appeal of the original. 

The Wrestlers statue serves a completely different purpose in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), in the scene where Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo di Caprio, is seeking to purchase a slave to use as a Mandingo fighter.  Leaving aside the historical question of whether Mandingo fighting (in the sense of bare-knuckle bouts to the death between two slaves) ever really existed, or was a product of a 1950s novel and a 1975 film (Max Evry, ‘Django Unexplained’, 2012), the presence of the statue in this scene suggests an cynical attempt by Candie to elevate his sordid exploitation of his slaves into a civilised ‘sport’, petrified in marble and thus given the implicit approval of antiquity.  Calvin Candie sees himself as a ‘Southern gentleman’, but his polished manners and elegant tailoring are just a veneer covering his brutality – and of course his ‘Greek’ statue is just a copy of a copy.

The original Greek pankatriasts in the statue were athletes competing in the Olympic Games.  If you killed your opponent while competing in the pankration it’s likely that you would have been disqualified; here, however, the Wrestlers are being used by   Candie to justify forcing enslaved people to fight to the death for their owners’ entertainment.  However, a further layer of nuance is added by the fact that the Roman copy of the statue – on which Candie’s copy is based - was the product of a society which was only too comfortable with the idea of having enslaved gladiators fighting to the death to entertain an audience.

                                            Wrestlers Statue at World of Glass, St Helens

The History of the Statue

The Wrestlers statue was discovered in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, a few days before 8 April 1583; we still have the letter announcing the discovery, written by a sculptor called Valerio Cioli.  In antiquity, the site occupied by this vineyard had been part of some sumptuous Roman pleasure-gardens, the Horti Lamiani, owned by the consul Lucius Aelius Lamia.  The Wrestlers were excavated alongside a group of statues showing Niobe and her children, and were originally thought to have belonged to the same group.  The Horti Lamiani site also produced two other famous Roman statues, the Esquiline Venus (Capitoline Museum, Rome) and the Lancellotti copy of Myron’s Discobolos (National Museum of Rome). 

Within a couple of months of its discovery, the Wrestlers was acquired by Cardinal Ferdinando de’Medici, to add to his sculpture collection at his villa on the Pincian Hill.  He also organised the restoration of the sculpture, the original condition of which can be seen from a print in one of the albums of antique statues at Rome produced by Cavalleriis.  Although his renditions of statues were not always very high-quality, they were at least free of imaginary reconstructions or fanciful settings – unlike, for example, François Perrier’s 1638 print, in which the Wrestlers fight in front of the Colosseum (Haskell & Penny, p.21).  From Cavalleriis’ print, we can see that the sculpture was quite severely damaged – the heads of both the wrestlers were missing, as well as the left foot of the upper figure and the lower right legs of both figures.  The statue as we see it now has been heavily restored – the head used for the lower figure was taken from another Roman statue, and the upper figure’s head was carved to match it.

                          Cavalleriis' print of the Wrestlers statue, showing the condition of

                                                       the statue when originally found

Cavalleriis captioned his print as filii Niobes luctantes – ‘the sons of Niobe wrestling’, showing that in the 16^th century the wrestlers were still assumed to belong to the  group of Niobe and her children being attacked by Apollo and Artemis.  In Ovid’s version of the story, two of Niobe’s sons, Phaedimus and Tantalus, were shot by Apollo while they were wrestling.  However, by the mid-17^th century this theory had fallen out of fashion, possibly because the Wrestlers had been moved to Florence, whereas the Niobids remained in Rome.    

Although it was originally assumed that the Wrestlers was a Greek statue, by the early 19^th century it was generally accepted that, like most of the other celebrated statues in Rome and Florence, it was in fact a Roman copy of a lost Greek original.  It’s now usually assumed to be a 1^st century AD Roman marble copy of a lost 3^rd century bronze Greek original.

Who made the original Greek statue? 

As usual, attempts have been made to give an attribution to this statue by comparing it to descriptions in the work of ancient authors.  Pliny the Elder (uncle of the Plinster, if you recall) includes ‘pankratiasts’ on his list of statues made by Myron, sculptor of the Discobolos (Discus-thrower).  However, most modern authorities agree that the statue is considerably later than the mid-5^th century, when Myron was working.  A more popular suggestion, on the basis of another brief passage in Pliny’s Natural History, is that the Wrestlers could have been made by Kephisodotos, son of Praxiteles (that is, the grandson of the Kephisodotos who made Eirene & Ploutos, or ‘Peace & Wealth’).  Pliny says that ‘Kephisodotos’s Symplegma at Pergamon is much praised, a work distinguished for the way the fingers seem to press on flesh rather than marble’. A symplegma is the Greek term used for a group of intertwined figures, which could perhaps apply to the Wrestlers.  It has also been suggested that the statue might have been made by a pupil or follower of Lysippos (Alexander the Great’s favourite sculptor, who made the Apoxyomenos or ‘Scraper’), an attribution currently preferred by the Uffizi.   

The Influence of the Statue

Once the statue was installed in the Villa Medici at Rome, its fame quickly spread, resulting in a string of copies in wax, plaster, marble and bronze. The statue’s fame really exploded, however, after it was moved from Rome to Florence in 1677 (along with two other stars of the Medici statue collection, the Venus de’Medici and the Arrotino, aka the ‘Knife-Sharpener’) in order to provide a more congenial environment in which Grand Duke Cosimo could take a daily constitutional around his palace in Florence.  Although the statues were smuggled out of Rome with minimal fuss, there was much consternation when it was revealed that they had been moved to Florence; there were even rumours that the Pope had been tricked into allowing them to leave Rome.     

The three statues, set against a backdrop of Old Master paintings, were installed in the Tribuna, a hexagonal room within the Uffizi Palace, a layout we can see in Johann Zoffany’s painting The Tribuna at the Uffizi, now in the Royal Collection.  During the 18^th century a vogue developed amongst Grand Tourists and other art collectors for commissioning paintings of their art collections, all conveniently gathered in a single room for connoisseurs to coo over.  Some of these paintings are effectively ‘wish-lists’, bringing together famous pieces in an imagined room.  Zoffany (who lived in Kew for much of his career; he’s buried in St Anne’s Church there) was the undoubted master of this genre of painting.  His painting of the Tribuna shows all the artworks that were displayed there in 1772, plus a few other items from the Medici collection which didn’t normally live there.  The Wrestlers is one of five statues in the painting, along with the Dancing Faun and the Venus de’ Medici.  In the foreground of the painting, the painter Thomas Patch is comparing the merits of Titian’s painting Venus of Urbino with the Wrestlers, positioned behind it.  Patch himself is pointing at the Wrestlers, suggesting that’s where his sympathies – and possibly his own sexual preferences – lie. 

With this type of publicity, it’s not surprising that the crowned heads of Europe were desperate to acquire their own versions of the Medici statues: the Wrestlers were often paired with the Arrotino (which hasn’t stood the test of time quite as well, possibly because the figure sharpening his knife is preparing to flay someone alive).  Philip IV of Spain ordered a cast, and Louis XIV of France had two marble copies made for his palaces at Versailles and Marly – the Versailles copy is now lost, but the Marly one is still in the Louvre.

Plenty of copies of the Wrestlers still decorate the gardens of British stately homes;   sometimes two casts would be made, one of which was reversed in order to create a symmetrical assemblage of wrestlers.  In the early 18^th century the Duke of Marlborough commissioned the sculptor Soldani to make bronzes of the four most famous Medici statues, including the Wrestlers.  In 1737 a marble copy was placed in the landscape gardens at Stowe, near Buckingham, along with other sculptures depicting ‘warriors’: Hercules lifting the giant Antaeus, Samson & the Philistine, and the Borghese Gladiator.  This statue was sold (along with most of the movable items from the estate) in the early 20^th century and has subsequently disappeared, although a new version cast in reconstituted stone, copied from the Blenheim Palace bronze, has recently been installed in the gardens.

The statue was also much-admired by Neoclassical sculptors.  Antonio Canova made his own terracotta copy (from a cast) so that he could study the intertwined arms and legs, and John Flaxman discussed the Wrestlers’ muscles in lectures he gave at the Royal Academy. Domenico Brucciani, the leading plaster-cast merchant in London in the 19^th century, had a Gallery of Casts in Covent Garden which he used as a showroom; he offered full-size casts for art schools and reduced-size casts for domestic settings. 

My own mini copy of the statue was picked up in Parkinsons in Southport (a real Aladdin’s Cave of books, geological specimens, fossils and antiquities – you never know exactly what you’re going to find in there) – it’s nice to know that I share the same exquisite taste as Uncle Monty!   

    Cast of the Wrestlers statue in marble resin by A Santini

Where to see it

The Wrestlers are still displayed in the Tribuna of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Casts and copies can be found at many locations, including the following:

Stowe Landscape Garden, Buckingham (National Trust) (reconstituted stone cast)

Hancock Museum, Newcastle (marble copy)

World of Glass, St Helens, Lancashire

Studley Royal, nr Ripon, Yorkshire (National Trust) (lead cast)

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire (bronze copy by Soldani)

Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen (plaster cast)

Louvre, Paris (marble copy originally made for Louis XIV by Philippe Magnier, c 1684-87)

You can view a 3D scan of the statue at:  www.digitalsculpture-uffizi.org.3Dmodelling

Paintings

Thomas Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall (c 1760-61) – shows

connoisseurs, including Patch himself, admiring the most famous Medici

statues, including the Wrestlers, in an imagined setting  (private collection)

Johann Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi (c. 1772-79) – commissioned by Queen

Charlotte in 17772 (usually on display at Windsor Castle)

References & Further Reading

Max Evry, ‘Django’ Unexplained: Was Mandingo Fighting a Real Thing?’

 (NextMovie, 25 December 2012)  

wwwmtv.com/news/2814256/is-mandingo-fighting-a-real-thing

Francis Haskell & Nicholas Penny, Taste & the Antique (Yale University Press, 1981)

Stephen G Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (Yale University Press, 2004)

J J Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources & Documents (Cambridge University Press, 1990)

David Stuttard, Power Games: Ritual & Rivalry at the Ancient Greek Olympics

                                                                                                   (British Museum Press, 2012)

Andrew Wilton & Icaria Bignamini (eds), Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century

                                                                                      (Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996)

Arabella Youens, ‘At Home with Uncle Monty: Design Cues from the Withnail & I Icon’

                                                       (Country Life, October 5 2017, www.countrylife.co.uk)

National Trust website, ‘The Wrestlers Return to Stowe’

                                         (www.nationaltrust.org/stowe/features/the-wrestlers-return-to-stowe)

Uffizi Gallery website:  www.uffizi.it/art/wrestlers