Wounded Gaul
The statue of a wounded Gaul in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens with the inventory number 247 dates back to around 100 BC. Dated.
The statue was found in the agora of the Italians on the island of Delos in 1882 . It is made of Parian marble and is 0.93 m high. The statue is heavily fragmented in parts and has been put together from several fragments, which have different states of preservation. The arms are missing from the elbows, the feet and part of the torso near the left shoulder. The head and the left arm including the shoulder are reattached to the rest of the body. There are flaws in the nose and lips. Missing pieces of the skull were added with another piece of marble.
The naked statue is fixed on a large plinth , which imitates an underground. The Gaul kneels on his right leg, the entire body weight is on this side of the body. The left leg is stretched out wide, the left arm raised high. This results in several linear orientations of the body. The extended left leg forms a line up to the head, the kneeling right leg forms a line with the extended right arm. The Gaul's helmet is on the right foot. On the inside of the thigh is a hole where an arrow wounded the warrior. In ancient times an arrow was certainly seen here. The muscles are developed all over the body and show great tension. The tense impression is heightened by the pain in the Gauls face and the disheveled hairstyle. The raised arm probably held a shield with which the wounded man tried to protect himself.
Such statues by Celts were in the late Hellenistic time of the statue around the year 100 BC. Not uncommon and found expression in modified forms such as the dying Gaul . Such forms come from the Pergamene school of Hellenistic sculpture. The statue is possibly a work of Agasias and was made for the Roman general Caius Marius to defeat the Cimbri and Teutons in 101 BC. To celebrate.
literature
- Nikolaos Kaltsas : Sculpture in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens . The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2002 ISBN 0-89236-686-9 , pp. 296-297.
