And if the Discobolus is, after all, a work of genre--a work merely
imitative of the detail of actual life--for the adornment of a room
in a private house, it would be only one of many such produced in
Myron's day. It would be, in fact, one of the pristae directly
attributed to him by Pliny, little congruous as they may seem with
the grandiose motions of his more characteristic work. The pristae,
the sawyers,--a celebrated creation of the kind,--is supposed to have
given its name to the whole class of like things. No [291] age,
indeed, since the rudiments of art were mastered, can have been
without such reproductions of the pedestrian incidents of every day,
for the mere pleasant exercise at once of the curiosity of the
spectator and the imitative instinct of the producer. The Terra-
Cotta Rooms of the Louvre and the British Museum are a proof of it.
One such work indeed there is, delightful in itself, technically
exquisite, most interesting by its history, which properly finds its
place beside the larger, the full-grown, physical perfection of the
Discobolus, one of whose alert younger brethren he may be,--the
Spinario namely, the boy drawing a thorn from his foot, preserved in
the so rare, veritable antique bronze at Rome, in the Museum of the
Capitol, and well known in a host of ancient and modern
reproductions.
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