The Discobolus Lancellotti is one of the most famous – and most precise – marble copies of a 5th-century bronze masterpiece by Green sculptor Myron.The sculpture was well-known in the ancient world. The Roman rhetorician and satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. AD 125 – c. AD 180) mentioned Myron in a work called Philopseudes. In a dialogue between characters Tychiades and Philocles, we find the lines:

The Discobolus is a physically gorgeous, young male athlete frozen in the pose of launching his disc. Although he is involved in a demanding situation, his face and body are unusually relaxed and composed. His head is turned towards his sporting equipment (but in some restorations he is “wrongly” looking ahead). In his 1956 book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, the British art historian and aesthete Kenneth Clark (1903-1983) observed that Myron captures two particular qualities – rhythmos (harmony and balance) and symmetria (bodily proportion). Regarding the action of the discus thrower, Clark wrote:

Myron has created the enduring pattern of athletic energy. He has taken a moment of action so transitory that students of athletics still debate if it is feasible…to a modern eye, it may seem that Myron’s desire for perfection has made him suppress too rigorously the sense of strain in the individual muscles.

Currently kept at the National Rome Museum’s Palazzo Massimo, it dates back to the 2nd century and replicates the lost original’s “pondering”, as great art historian Giulio Carlo Argan has commented: “the strength of the gesture remains unchanged from anywhere you look at the statue. Not only that, but each view contains in itself, potentially, all the others, as if the statue could be seen simultaneously from all possible points of view.”

“The sense of Muron’s new plasticity is all in this ability to include every particular view in the total consistence of form in space.”

Next to the Discobolus Lancellotti – found on the Esquiline Hill in 1781, transferred to Germany in the second half of the 1930s and brought back to Rome in 1948 – is another copy, the Discobolus of Castelporziano, which is missing the head.

According to www.italianways.com