The Victorious Youth Sculpture

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The Victorious Youth By: Laina Pruitt “The so-called Victorious Youth, or Getty Bronze, represents a handsome young man with a sleek and graceful body, standing at ease, one hip elegantly cocked. His head held high, his expression detached, he raises one hand toward the olive wreath on his head,” (Mattusch 1). The classical bronze statue presently stands in the Getty Museum in Malibu, California which is one of a large breed that we have barely encountered. The popularity of a life size sculpture in fifth century B.C. was at no exception to The Victorious Youth as he stands at the astonishing height of four feet eleven inches! After a huge storm in the Adriatic Sea, by chance did The Victorious Youth hoisted back onto land to be studied. Causing great excitement for many specialists, such a discovery is a rare and original experience opening new doors for new ideas and information from the past. “Despite the paucity of underwater finds, even today, Willard Bascom, a pioneer of underwater archaeology, has estimated that about twenty thousand ships sand in the Mediterranean world and the Black Sea during the first Millennium B.C.” (Mattusch 4). A few things that many statues have in common that have been found in the Mediterranean are that they are found in there original context as well as using bronze and copper inlays to create the human like figures. The Victorious Youth was found secluded with calcium salts built up around its figure, and the condition of the statue was incrusted from being below in the marine life and was unrecognizable to many scholars. “The eyes of the figure were originally inlaid with colored stone or glass paste and the nipples were inlaid with copper, creating naturalistic color contrasts,”(J. Paul Getty). An object once held in his left hand was reaching upwards towards his head and most likely the item was a wreath and

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