The Boxer

In the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, there are two statues in a rather small, bare room.  One is a heroic bronze of the Hellenistic age, the last great era of Greek art.  It shows a nude young man leaning nonchalantly on a lance.  His head seems just a bit too small for the larger-than-life-size body.  He was, they say, a Seleucid prince, and the image was perhaps made in around 100 B.C.  The body is perfect, a paragon of male beauty.  The face is smooth, the expression bland and slightly smug.  I didn’t feel, while viewing this piece of ancient eye-candy, that if the statue began to speak, he would say anything interesting.

The other figure, in bronze, is a middle-aged man sitting on a large stone.  He, too, is nude (or nearly so), wearing only leather wrappings around his hands and wrists.  His body is muscular and athletic, though it sags with exhaustion.  It might be a paragon of classical beauty, too, except that his shoulders are spattered with blood (represented by applied copper, red against dark bronze).  His head is turned, as if looking at someone standing over his right shoulder.  His hair and beard are thick and curly.  His eyes are dark, because the sockets are empty, and show only the darkness within the hollow sculpture.  Once, the sockets would have held eyes made of glass or stone, but they have been lost.

There are bleeding cuts, again represented by applied copper, on the bridge and end of his broken nose, on his forehead and eyebrows, and beneath his eyes, where the swollen flesh has split apart.   His lips are swollen, too, and his ears.  The sculptor has somehow managed to convey the impression of cumulative damage as well.  The man slumped on the stone is old beyond his years, and immensely weary.

The figure was cast using the lost-wax process.  It also is Hellenistic, and may date from between 330 B.C. and 50 B.C.  Some attribute it to Lyssipus, Alexander’s favourite sculptor, but most scholars disagree.  Others say it is the work of Apollonius the Athenian, and that he signed it on a strap of the fighter’s gloves.  Or, of course, it could have been created by an ancient genius of whom we know nothing.  It was found on the slopes of the Quirinal, in Rome, in 1885, during building excavations.  Perhaps it came from the Baths of Constantine.

It may be that the battered face was designed to shock, or frighten, or simply demonstrate the sculptor’s skill.  I don’t think so.  I think the sculptor has attempted something profound, and achieved it. To me, the man is not just a washed-up boxer.  He’s a brilliant metaphor for the wounds we all accumulate, body and soul; when you go, look into his anguished face, swollen lips parted as if asking for mercy or rest.  You may be tempted to whisper, “Rest, my friend.  I understand.” 

Text © 2015 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2015 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Magazine, July 2015