Discobolus

If we may trust the old marbles, -- my friend with his arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery of this metropolis, -- those Greek young men were of supreme beauty. ❋ Various (N/A)

No statue of a warrior was sculptured in the varied attitudes of attack and defence; no wrestler, no _discobolus_, no pugilist exhibited the grace, the vigor, or the muscular action of a man; nor were the beauties, the feeling, and the elegance of female forms displayed in stone: all was made to conform to the same invariable model, which confined the human figure to a few conventional postures. ❋ Unknown (N/A)

You are strong enough, certainly, but the art of the discobolus must be learned like any other. ❋ Georg Ebers (1867)

The eyes, the facial lines which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the coming motion of the discus as those of an onlooker might be; [289] but that head does not really belong to the discobolus. ❋ Walter Pater (1866)

In any passable representation of the Greek discobolus, as in any passable representation of an English cricketer, there can be no successful evasion of the natural difficulties of the thing to be done -- the difficulties of competing with nature itself, or its maker, in that marvellous combination of motion and rest, of inward mechanism with the so smoothly finished surface and outline -- finished ad unguem -- which enfold it. ❋ Walter Pater (1866)

If we may trust the old marbles, my friend with his arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery of this metropolis, -- those Greek young men were of supreme beauty. ❋ Oliver Wendell Holmes (1851)