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 Roman copy is the only one of the Ephesian group to have a surviving right arm
New York, Metropolitan Museum
Purchased 1907-8
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 171 (n.7)
Richter: Sculpture & Sculptors of the Greeks (1950), fig.656
Richter: Catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum New York (1954), 29, no.37
Lawrence: Classical Sculpture (1928), 208-
Furtwängler: Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture, 128
Pliny: Natural History XXXIV.19
Said to have been found in 1771 at Tor Colombare on the Appian Way outside Rome by Gavin Hamilton. Later at Lansdowne House
