Description
The statuette shows a seated male figure. The legs are delicate and rather diminutive, with the right leg bent in front of the body and the left folded backward, almost underneath the body. The arms are upraised and, similar to the legs, bent and asymmetrical. Both hands are clenched. In a position unusual for Olmec art, the shoulders are not situated directly above the hips, but twisted slightly to the right, giving the sculpture a sense of movement that is accentuated by the well-defined muscles and the dynamic positioning of the arms.
The head is bald, but it lacks the highly stylized cranial deformation found in many Olmec figurines or the wooden busts of El Manati. The figure wears a mustache and goatee, relatively rare features in Olmec sculpture which appear on only a few reliefs such as La Venta Monument 3.
The figure wears only a lightly outlined loincloth, leading to the supposition that the statuette originally was dressed in ritualistic clothing that has perished with the passage of time.
This sculpture is fully three-dimensional and presumed to be intended for viewing from all sides: the rear view shows carefully sculpted shoulder blades and a slight naturalistic bulge that is visible above the belt at the hips. Mary Ellen Miller finds that "the long diagonal of line of the figure's back and shoulders is as beautiful and commanding as the frontal view". The figure clearly is more free-flowing than other three-dimensional Olmec sculptures (than, for example, San Martin Pajapan Monument 1), which frequently are boxy and seemingly "confined" by the medium from which they are carved.
Read more about this topic: The Wrestler (sculpture)
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Once a child has demonstrated his capacity for independent functioning in any area, his lapses into dependent behavior, even though temporary, make the mother feel that she is being taken advantage of....What only yesterday was a description of the child’s stage in life has become an indictment, a judgment.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)