support. This may seem little enough, but it was novel and could have appeared grotesquely inadequate in the hands of the
incompetent or imperceptive. Fighting or exercising figures are often less subtle but no less accurate in the observation of
life which they display, but there is an age of experience between Myron's discus-thrower who is virtually a freestanding
relief, and Lysippus' who seems to pull the viewer round to admire him from any angle. Frontality came naturally to an
Archaic artist and was encouraged by architectural sculpture and the setting of most statues. The abandonment of the
implied frame or backdrop in statuary was answered in painting by a new sense of space which had also to be balanced in
the composition.
Sculpture remains the senior art. Our knowledge of it is poor. Few of the finest works, generally bronzes, survive, and little
architectural sculpture (but, luckily, that of the Parthenon) is of prime quality. Other original works are decorative or
commemorative, like the grave reliefs, and seldom of high quality. And we have Roman-period copies of Classical works,
identified for us with their artists from the texts of later writers. These may reveal little more than subject and general
appearance, and we rely on them for what we think we know of the style of a Myron, Polyclitus, or Lysippus. But when
original works of the first rank do appear, like the Riace bronzes from a shipwreck off Italy (plate facing p. 246) we begin
to sense how much we are missing, how less than perfect such familiar masterpieces as the Delphi charioteer may be.
Iamos, from the east pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, completed in 546B.C. The artist has carefully observed the
flaccid, ageing body, and in the gesture and features he expresses the old seer's anticipation of disaster.
Many think that the Riace bronzes are from a dedication set at Delphi in the mid-century by the Athenians to celebrate their
success at Marathon. We can read what we will into the extrovert young male and his quieter more mature companion (and
there must have been more to the group). Apart from such works, an Athens which had stopped decorating its tombs around