DISCOBOLOS GOES TO THE MOVIES: STATUE OF THE MONTH JUNE 2020

DISCOBOLOS GOES TO THE MOVIES:

STATUE OF THE MONTH: JUNE 2020

What did Scarlet Overkill from the 2015 Minions movie have in common with Adolf Hitler (other than a desire for world domination)?  The answer is that they both managed to acquire the same statue: a marble copy the Discobolos (the Discus-Thrower).  In the Minions movie we get a glimpse of Scarlet Overkill’s stash of looted art treasures, a hoard of instantly-recognisable cultural icons: Michelangelo’s David, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can, one of the Easter Island moai – and, representing the art of the ancient world, the marble Discobolos.

Unlike other pieces of ancient art, Discobolos doesn’t require any knowledge of the mythological or religious context in order to understand it.  It’s obvious what’s going on here: it’s a nude guy (Greek athletic contests were held in the nude) in the process of throwing a discus.  The statue is so widely-recognised by the public that it has been used in several adverts, including a watch advert (timeless elegance?).  It can often be spotted as set-dressing for documentaries on the ancient world, such as the BBC series I, Caesar.  Before Greece joined the Eurozone, this statue appeared on Greek banknotes, such as the thousand-drachma note below, celebrating the Olympic Games.

In the Victorian era the statue was seen as the embodiment of the Greek athletic ideal, with a bit of closet homoeroticism thrown in: the critic Walter Pater, whose career was blighted by rumours of a gay relationship with one of his Oxford students, wrote in 1894 that it embodied ‘all one had ever fancied or seen in old Greece or on Thames-side, of the unspoiled body of youth.’

In the twentieth century, however, the Discobolos has come to signify something more sinister than the wholesome world of Greek athletics, to the extent that it can be used as a piece of visual shorthand to signify Nazi ideology.  For example, in the Norwegian film The King’s Choice (2016), a dramatisation of events surrounding the German invasion of Norway in 1940, a copy of the Discobolos is used to show us that we’re in the German Embassy in Oslo.    

In this article we’ll look at the history of the Discobolos statue and how it came to acquire such an ideological charge for modern viewers.

The Original Statue: Myron’s Discobolos

.The original statue of the discus-thrower wasn’t marble, but bronze – the creation of the Greek sculptor Myron (c 450 BC), so famous for his lifelike bronzes that a farmer from Hicksville, Attica supposedly tried to milk his statue of a bronze cow on the Athenian Acropolis.  The cow statue was so famous that it inspired several pieces of snappy poetry, such as this epigram by Dioskorides from the Greek Anthology: 

            O bull, in vain do you nudge this heifer.  For it is lifeless;
            Myron, the cow-sculptor, has deceived you.

                                      (Dioskorides, Greek Anthology 9.734, JJ Pollitt translation)

Myron’s brilliance in producing bronze facsimiles of people and animals always reminds me of the Roger Corman B-movie Bucket of Blood, where a talentless art student realises that he can create stunningly lifelike statues by covering dead cats (her later moves onto murdering humans) in a layer of plaster.  But I digress …

Sadly, Myron’s bronze statue of the discus-thrower hasn’t survived – but we do have about twenty Roman marble copies of the statue, some of which are very battered and fragmentary – so battered, in fact, that the ones discovered prior to 1781 weren’t even recognised as copies of the Discobolos and were instead imaginatively restored as figures from Greek mythology: Endymion shielding his eyes from the Moon (his dog was later removed to turn him into one of the sons of Niobe, under attack from Apollo and Artemis).  The picture below, showing a Discobolos reworked into a Dying Gladiator (Capitoline Museum, Rome) shows how speculative many eighteenth-century reconstructions were, adding limbs and props to damaged torsos.

Discobolos restored as a Dying Gladiator (Capitoline Museum, Rome)

 Another Discobolos torso found at Ostia in 1772 was turned into Diomedes stealing the Palladium, a statue of Athene which represented the luck of Troy.  It was purchased by the Lansdowne family and it’s still on display at their family seat, Bowood House near Calne in Wiltshire (which also contains lots of other cool and unexpected things, like Lord Byron’s Albanian costume and the laboratory where Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen in 1774).

Why did Myron create the bronze discus-thrower?  The most likely assumption is that this statue commemorates a winner of the pentathlon (not necessarily a portrait of the athlete) at one of the four games which constituted the Greek ‘Games Circuit’ (Olympia, Delphi, Nemea and Isthmia).  Discus-throwing wasn’t a standalone event; it only took place within the context of the pentathlon - along with the long jump, javelin, wrestling and a sprint race of just under 200m.  We don’t know where Myron’s statue stood, although Pliny the Elder says that he created statues of ‘contestants in the pentathlon at Delphi’. 

                                  Greek vase-painting showing a pentathlon contestant with discus,
                                                 jumping weights & a rake for the sand pit

An alternative suggestion is that the statue might represent a figure from Greek mythology: the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, loved by Apollo and Zephyrus, god of the west wind.  Zephyrus, jealous that the boy preferred Apollo over him, blew Apollo’s discus off-course one day while he was giving Hyacinthus some tips on athletic technique; the discus hit Hyacinthus on the head and killed him outright. The flower named after him supposedly sprouted from his blood.  As the name Hyacinthus contains the pre-Greek cinthus element, it’s possible that Hyacinthus might originally have been an ancient Peloponnesian fertility god – which could explain why the Spartans celebrated the Hyacinthia festival every spring in his honour.  

Myron managed to capture a precise moment in the discus-throwing sequence, where the athlete has taken the discus back to its furthest point before releasing it forwards.  The ‘severe’ expression, typical on statues from this period (about 450 BC), creates an impression of intense concentration.  The legs are shown in profile, but the twist at the waist means that the shoulders are almost full frontal.  This statue was very innovative for its time due to its suggestion of potential movement (we can tell exactly what the thrower is going to do next) and its unusual asymmetric composition.  It’s been designed so that the viewer starts from the discus itself (as circular objects tend to draw the eye most), then sweeps down the graceful arc made by the discus-thrower’s arms, then back up the other side of the body in a series of zigzags.

This statue was clearly designed to work from one particular viewpoint (possibly suggesting that it originally stood in front of a wall?).  If you look at the statue from other viewpoints, particularly side-on, the effect of the arc/zigzag composition is completely lost; the limbs become tangled and the figure looks unstable, as if it’s about to topple over. 

The intrusive tree-trunk which appears on the marble copies was not a feature of the original bronze statue; it was added by the Roman copyists to provide extra support, as marble has lower tensile strength than bronze. This plaster cast in the Ashmolean Cast Gallery, painted to give the effect of bronze, shows what the original statue would have looked like without the tree-trunk. 

Roman Copies:  The Lancellotti Version & the Townley Version

The two most famous Roman marble copies of the Discobolos are the Lancellotti version (now in the Terme Museum, Rome) and the Townley version (now in the British Museum, London).  The two statues are slightly different, so its worth looking at the circumstances of their discovery before we explore their subsequent history.

The Lancellotti Discobolos was discovered in 1781 on the Esquiline Hill on land owned by the Massimo family, who retained possession of the statue until 1938 (note the date, we’ll come back to that in a minute).  It was realised almost immediately that it must be a copy of Myron’s statue, as it matched descriptions by ancient writers, including the 2^nd century AD Greek writer Lucian: ‘the discus-thrower, who is bent over into the throwing position, is turned toward the hand that holds the discus, and has the opposite knee gently flexed, like one who will straighten up again after the throw’ (Lucian, Philopseudes, 18: JJ Pollitt’s translation).  

The statue was housed in the Palazzo Massimi, later being moved to another of the family’s residences, the Palazzo Lancellotti (which is how it acquired the name it is usually known by).  The statue wasn’t on show to the public, and the Massimo family repeatedly turned down offers to buy it – including one from King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who wanted the statue for his new sculpture museum, the Munich Glyptothek.  

Left: Lancellotti Discobolos, Terme Museum, Rome
(head facing back)
(Picture: Wikimedia Commons)


Right: Townley Discobolos,
British Museum, London
(head facing forward)







The Townley Discobolos:  Ten years later, another Roman copy of the Discobolos turned up, this time at Tivoli (yes, Hadrian’s Villa again).  It was purchased in 1794 for £400 (about £60,000 in today’s prices) by the British collector Ha  Charles Townley, owner of Towneley Hall near Burnley (eighteenth-century spellings were a bit fluid). Townley dithered for a while over buying the statue, as he wasn’t sure whether the quality merited the price-tag; the art dealer Thomas Jenkins (a Brit based in Rome) hustled him by telling him that other buyers were interested, including the Pope and the Marquess of Lansdowne (who already owned the Discobolos that had been ‘restored’ as Diomedes stealing the Palladium). 

The statue was almost intact when it was found – apart from its head, which was missing.  Thomas Jenkins arranged for the statue to be restored, using a head which he claimed had been found next to it. We now know that this head didn’t belong to the Discobolos at all, but probably came from a statue of Hermes.  The use of the ‘wrong’ head meant that it had to be attached to face forward, rather than facing back towards the discus as in the Lancellotti version.  Although the Lancellotti head is more accurate in terms of discus-throwing technique, the Townley version is more elegant, as elegant, as the head doesn’t break up the arc formed by the discus-thrower’s arms.  

The Pope initially refused an export licence for the statue, but fortunately a third Discobolos turned up at Tivoli (again with its head missing) so the Pope kept that one, which is still in the Vatican Museum - its head was replaced, rather ironically, with a replica of the head fitted to the Townley statue.  Townley was a Catholic (as were many members of the 18^th century Lancashire gentry) which may have helped him to obtain an export licence from the Pope.  However, Ian Jenkins from the British Museum has suggested that the Pope’s change of heart might have resulted from his fear of an imminent French invasion – meaning that he needed to keep the Brits sweet.

Although the Townley statue was less ‘correct’ than the Lancellotti statue, it was far more accessible and therefore became the more famous of the two.  It was also used as the model for most plaster casts and souvenir copies of the Discobolos, such as my own copy, purchased in Greece.  

Charles Townley displayed the Discobolos in the sculpture gallery at his London house (7 Park Street, Westminster).  In this 1794 watercolour by William Chambers (British Museum collection) we can see that the Discobolos had become the centrepiece of Townley’s collection, the first thing you saw when you entered the room.   

                               William Chambers, Sculpture Gallery at 7 Park Street, 1794.  (British Museum)

Townley’s sculpture collection was also depicted in Johann Zoffany’s fantastic painting of Charles Townley’s library at his London house.  With considerable artistic licence, Zoffany’s painting imagined all the sculptures crammed into the library, being discussed by Townley and his intellectual chums.  The original version of the painting dates back to the early 1780s; when Townley acquired the Discobolos in 1794 he asked Zoffany to add it to the painting, which is why it’s in the foreground.  

         Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley's Library, 1781-83 & 1798 

(Townley Hall Art Gallery & Museum, Burnley)

When Townley died in 1805, his sculpture collection passed to the British Museum, where millions of visitors (over 5 million last year alone) have seen the Discobolos over the last two hundred years. The Lancellotti statue, by contrast, remained hidden away in the Massimo family’s private residence, acquiring an almost legendary status.     

Hitler, the Olympics & the Discobolo

That situation changed after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  The opening sequence of Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s film about the games, featured the metamorphosis of the white marble Discobolos into the German decathlete Erwin Huber, suggesting that the statue represented the perfect ‘Aryan’ athlete (whereas the original bronze statue, of course, would have given out a very different message).

Hitler decided that he wanted to bring the Discobolos to Germany, and in 1937 began negotiations to purchase the statue from the Massimo-Lancellotti family.  Although there was opposition to the sale in Italy, Mussolini’s government clearly saw the diplomatic benefits to be obtained from allowing the sale to go through.  Count Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Minister for Foreign Affairs) issued an export licence and the statue was sold for 5 million lira.  It arrived in Germany in June 1938 and went on display in the Glyptothek in Munich – the first time the Lancellotti version had been on display to the general public since its discovery in 1781. 

                      The Unveiling of the Discobolos at the Munich Glyptothek, 1938

After the war the American ‘Monuments Men’ insisted that that the Lancellotti Discobolos should be returned to Italy (even though it had technically been purchased, rather than looted) and should be placed in a public collection.  It was returned in 1948 and is still on display in the Terme Museum (a branch of the National Roman Museum).

In a possible dig at Hitler’s attempt to appropriate the statue as a poster-boy for Aryan manhood, the official poster for the 1948 London Olympics sought to reclaim the Discobolos (in its British Museum version, of course), superimposed against the Place of Westminster and overlaid by the Olympic rings (poster by Walter Herz, 1948).

One of the reasons the Discobolos fascinates me is that it managed to break into the accepted ‘canon’ of great Greek art even though it was discovered some years after Winckelmann’s death (and therefore didn’t feature in his influential book, The History of Ancient Art).  It’s even more surprising that it broke into the canon given that right from the outset everyone accepted that it was only a copy of a lost original. This hadn’t been the case with statues like the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon, whose authenticity only began to be questioned centuries after their discovery.  I sometimes find it strange that I’ve spent much of my working life discussing inferior copies of lost masterpieces). 

As we’ve seen, the British Museum statue (the Townley version) became the most iconic version of the Discobolos.  But next time you’re watching Minions, take a good look: Scarlet Overkill stole the Lancellotti version of the statue – the very same one that Hitler purchased in 1938.

Where to See It

Museo Nazionale (Terme Museum), Rome - the Lancellotti version, a Roman marble

                            copy with the head in the ‘correct’ position, turning back to look at the discus

British Museum, London – the Townley version, a Roman marble copy with a replacement head in
                            the ‘incorrect’ position, facing outwards

Ashmolean Museum Cast Gallery, Oxford – bronze-coloured plaster cast, showing what the original

                  bronze statue would have looked like without the addition of the supporting tree-trunk

 Pushkin Museum, Tsvetaev Cast Collection, Moscow – plaster cast of the Lancellotti version

 Glyptothek, Munich – small Hellenistic bronze version

References & Further Reading

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

 Ian Jenkins, The Discobolus (British Museum Objects in Focus series, London: British Museum
                                                                                                          Press, 2012)

JJ Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources & Documents (Cambridge: Cambridge University
        Press, 1990) – for translations of quotations from Petronius, the Greek Anthology & Lucian

Susan Woodford, An Introduction to Greek Art (Duckworth, 1986)

Minions, Illumination Entertainment 2015, directed by Pierre Coffin & Kyle Balda

The King’s Choice (2016), directed by Erik Poppe