[Illustration: FIG. 29.—Head of the _Diadoumenos_, after Polykleitos. Albertinum, Dresden.]
A later variant of the statue is seen in a small terra-cotta statuette from Smyrna in private possession in London.[1153] It shows the Polykleitan type so completely assimilated to the style of Praxiteles that its genuineness has been doubted. Perhaps, with its Attic softness, it gives us a better idea of the beauty of the original than many of the other copies. Finally, we must mention the original bronze head of the fifth century B. C. in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, recently published by Percy Gardner.[1154] This head, put together from nine fragments, and restored as that of a boy fillet-binder, and rivaling in delicacy and beauty such original bronzes as the Beneventum head (Fig. 3) and the _Idolino_ (Pl. 14), not only gives us the best idea of the technical ability attained by bronze workers in the middle of the fifth century B. C., but also helps us to understand the ancient repute of Polykleitos’ athletes. Here the headband and “starfish” arrangement of the hair have their close parallels in the Dresden, Kassel, and British Museum heads already discussed, which essentially reproduce the head of the Vaison statue (Fig. 28). As Gardner points out, it closely agrees with the type of the _Farnese Diadoumenos_ (Pl. 17) only in one particular, the mode of tying the knot. While the Vaison athlete is preparing to tie it, the Farnese one has just finished the operation, the boy still holding the ends of the fillet in his hands. But only the treatment of the hair, the eye, and the ear offers a contrast. Despite these differences Gardner follows the older view of Brunn in regarding the Vaison and Farnese types as two variants of Polykleitan originals; but the pose, style, and proportions of the latter seem to us to be too thoroughly Attic to warrant us in bringing it into relation with the work of Polykleitos. Though the heads of the two are not so dissimilar, the pose, as Gardner also points out, is quite different. The Vaison figure is represented as walking, _i. e._, in the very act of changing the weight of the body from one leg to the other, while the Farnese athlete stands at rest with both feet flat upon the ground. Gardner rightly regards this exquisite head not as the original of the statue mentioned by Pliny, since the Vaison and Delian copies show that the latter represented a fully developed man, somewhat over life-size, and not a boy, but rather as a work of the Polykleitan school, though he does not exclude the possibility that it may come from one of the many boy athletes of the master.