We sometimes get breakfast at Bill’s in Richmond. This restaurant chain makes a point of artistic location or interior or both: the one in Greenwich has a wrap-around window across from the cathedral-sized church of the town’s patron saint, and the one in Richmond commands the bridge over the Thames and has a collection of sculpture replicas.
On one windowsill there’s a swan, on another a dog just like one Pupp I used to know, with relaxedly crossed paws.
Elsewhere there’s a nude of voluptuous rococo style,
and a copy of the Discobolus, or “discus thrower,” of Myron.
Myron’s original bronze is lost and this is a copy of one of the many replicas and imitations that have survived, mostly made in Roman times. In some versions the athlete is glancing backward at his discus.
Myron came from a place called Eleutherae on the northern border of Attica, the territory of Athens. He was surprisingly early in the history of classic Greek sculpture; he flourished about 480 to 440 BC, earlier than Pheidias (sculptor of the Athena in the Parthenon and the Zeus at Olympia).
It is known that Myron made commemorative sculptures of several victors of the four-yearly Olympic games. Did he have the athlete hold this pose? It’s possible, since the pose is an instant of stasis.
I have always thought the Discobolus to be the perfect embodiment of poise in motion – “dynamic equilibrium.” The discus-thrower’s pre-throw poise is one of a set of actions of withdrawing in order to project power forward: the baseball pitcher’s wind-up with raised arm and knee, the tennis server’s upward toss and behind-back racket, the raising of the whip or the fishing rod before it is flicked, the sprinter on the blocks.
When I was teaching myself to program in Fortran, I sometimes went down to Furman University’s computer department and got help from the professors. The crew-cut junior professor’s given name was Myron. To show me some example, he might reach to his shelves for a folder or a disk, and I told him I would nickname him Discobolus. The joke fell flat, he did not know of the sculptor.
Further note: the Greek word diskos has been borrowed into English at several times, therefore undergoing different numbers of sound changes and giving us our words dish, desk, disk (or disc) and discus. And I had had the idea that dais is another reflection of the same origin, but no, it is from Hindi or Urdu.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
And the bolus, for throw or thrower. I remember a geometry teacher saying parabola was “a throw along” and hyperbola “an over throw,” along or over infinity, he thought. Then later studying projective geometry, that the parabola can be thought of as an ellipse that “touches” infinity, and the hyperbola as an ellipse that crosses over infinity. Lovely thoughts. Thanks for the discobolus!
Or disco?! There’s a Disko Bay up in Greenland,-15c there right now,but it’ll be unrelated and I’m guessing a native name or corruption thereof?