Ares Borghese
Unknown, after a Greek original of the late 5th century BC · Roman, c. 100 BC - AD 50
A young man stands naked and entirely at ease, weight on the right leg, left hand once resting on a spear and right arm hanging loose. The only sign of what he is comes from the helmet pushed high on his head and from the slim ring encircling his left ankle. Nothing about him is aggressive, which is exactly the ancient Greek paradox: Ares, the god of war in its brutal and unglamorous form, is shown here with the poise of an athlete in repose, divine power expressed as perfect physical balance rather than as menace.
The marble is Roman, carved somewhere between the first century BC and the first century AD, and reproduces a bronze of the late fifth century BC that scholars have often connected with the Ares set up by Alcamenes in Athens. The proportions are Polykleitan, with the deep chest, small head and long thighs of a figure conceived as a canon of male beauty. Look at how the hair is treated as a mass of short curls drilled to catch shadow, and at the support left as a tree trunk against the right leg, an addition the bronze original never needed. The helmet's cheek pieces are raised, a formal touch that keeps the face fully visible.
The statue appears in the Borghese collection in Rome by the seventeenth century, where it was restored and given its modern name. In 1807 Napoleon persuaded Camillo Borghese, who had married his sister Pauline, to part with the family's antiquities for a sum well below their value, and several hundred sculptures including this one travelled to Paris. It remains one of the finest surviving reflections of a lost Athenian masterpiece.
Did You Know? The small ring around his left ankle has never been satisfactorily explained; suggestions range from an athlete's amulet to a reference to the chains in which Aphrodite's husband once caught the war god.
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