Studies from the antique

Wrestlers (after the antique). Italian, 16th Century. Artist unknown. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

This study "from the antique" is by an unknown mid-sixteenth century Italian artist. It is typical of the kind of excercise young painters undertook in order to learn how the artists of ancient Greece and Rome had shown the human body as both naturalistic in its movement and idealized in its beauty. Interest in the style of the ancient sculptors had been stimulated by archeological finds in Italy.

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