Praxitelizing ephebes and satyrs



Praxiteles's influence on representations of the male nude by his contemporaries and followers is particularly difficult to establish: only one male nude (the Apollo Sauroktonos) has been positively attributed to Praxiteles – yet the latter's anatomical treatment and pose, with its exaggerated throwing-out of the hip, is hardly innovative in the context of other works of the period.

19th-century commentators hailed "Florentine Apollino"( Inv. n 229) as a replica of the statue type known as the Lucian Apollo, mentioned by the 2nd-century AD Greek writer Lucian. The type is represented on Athenian coins from the 1st-century AD, and by some 30 copies. The sculptural canon and the soft rendering of the anatomy led some 19th-century experts to compare it to the Apollo Sauroktonos, while others compared the proportions of the head to those of the Aphrodite of Cnidus. Rejecting the attribution to Praxiteles, it was then identified as a derivation of a Praxitelean prototype, carved by a descendant or successor of Praxiteles himself – one of his sons, perhaps, or another sculptor of the early Hellenistic period. The existence of a Praxitelean prototype for the work has also been called into question, however: the Apollino may in fact represent the transposition into a Praxitelizing sculptural vocabulary of an original work dating from the early Roman Empire, by a sculptor of the day. Between 1661 and 1684, the sculptor Fremery (Inv MR 1892)produced a marble copy of the Florentine Apollino during his stay at the Académie de France in Rome.

Mercury (Inv n250) features a Polykleitian-style head and crossed legs borrowed from Skopas, but shows no Praxitelizing features apart from its pose and the soft treatment of the flesh, which became the norm for representations of ephebes.

Praxiteles's figures of Eros (generally thought to have been cast in bronze) were difficult to copy or adapt due to their wings, and seem to have disappeared quite quickly from the sculptural repertory, despite attracting lavish praise in the literary sources. The Centocelle Eros (Inv 769) may be a classicizing Roman work, testifying to the lasting heritage of certain aspects of Greek sculpture: the Polykleitian contrapposto, Praxiteles's soft modeling, and the elaborately arranged hair of Hellenistic works. Praxiteles's Eros of Thespiai, which Pliny says was to be found in Rome, was doubtless destroyed in the great fire of 80 AD. The work's early disappearance and the difficulty of making marble copies of winged figures doubtless explain why this group of works by Praxiteles is known only in the form of pastiches, rather than accurate replicas.

About the "Aberdeen Head", often described as having been inspired by the Olympian Hermes, there is nothing to support a positive identification of the figure. This is clearly a Greek work in the Praxitelean style. Assuming it was carved shortly after the Olympian Hermes (and assuming the latter to be an original Greek work, rather than a Roman copy), the head would date from the third quarter of the 4th century BC. If we take the Olympian Hermes to be a Roman work, however, we might identify other Greek influences in the Aberdeen Head's fleshy brow line and deep-set eyes (reminiscent of Skopas), or the robust energy of the face (comparable to Lysippos), suggesting a revised date of around 280 BC.