Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(There’s a passing, but highly relevant, note about male genitals, and an ancient Greek male nude bronze. Just a warning for the wary.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, offering khaki Kasper Joggers from Helsinki Athletica, as modeled by a guy with a hugely prominent package, visible in full detail (down to his dickhead) through the stretch nylon / cotton / Elastene blend fabric. Meanwhile, the model is carefully, sculpturally posed, with luminously bronzed skin tones, in a way that seemed hauntingly familiar to me:

(#1) Not at all your ordinary DJ ad

Then I concentrated on just the head, and got a hit in my memory bank: the Ephebe of Marathon, by Praxiteles or someone like him.

The head:

(#2)

About the statue, from Wikipedia:

The Marathon Boy or Ephebe of Marathon is a Greek bronze sculpture found in the Aegean Sea in the bay of Marathon in 1925.

The sculpture is conserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens where it is dated to around 340–330 BC. The Museum suggests that the subject is the winner of an athletic competition. With its soft musculature and exaggerated contrapposto, its style is associated with the school of Praxiteles.

(#3)

The upraised arm and the distribution of weight indicate that in his original context, this ephebe was leaning against a vertical support, such as a column

(The DJ model’s posture is completely different from this, which is what led me at first away from recognizing the head.)

Linguistic notes from NOAD:

noun ephebe:  (in ancient Greece) a young man of 18–20 years undergoing military training.
[pronunciations: / ˈɛfib, əˈfib / ]

noun contrapposto: Sculpture an asymmetrical arrangement of the human figure in which the line of the arms and shoulders contrasts with, while balancing, those of the hips and legs.

Then, about the model in #1: his head is a tribute to young masculine beauty in Greek terms, his groin a tribute to young masculine desirability in modern gay terms.

This entry was posted on June 20, 2020 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Art, Underwear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.