Roman copy of one of the Ephesian Amazons. According to a passage in Pliny’s Natural History four sculptors, Pheidias, Polykleitos, Kresilas and Phradmon, competed for the job of making a statue of an Amazon for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The sculptors themselves were to choose the best and, after each voting for themselves, Polykleitos came out the winner.
How seriously we should take this story is doubtful as even Pliny believed it to be improbable. Nevertheless, scholars have long argued over which sculptor made which of this group of four Amazons. This version is a Roman copy by another sculptor, Sosikles
Rome, Capitoline Museum, Salone 33
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 171 (n.7), pl. 61.1
Richter: Sculpture & Sculptors of the Greeks (1950), 236, fig.627
Richter: Three Critical Periods in Greek Sculpture, 46
Walston: Catalogue of Casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889), 60, no.271
Lawrence: Classical Sculpture (1928), 208-
Furtwängler: Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture, 128
Pliny: Natural History XXXIV.19
SOSIKLES
