AN ITALIAN SERPENTINE GROUP OF `THE WRESTLERS'

'The Wrestlers', also known as 'The Pancrastinae', is inspired by a Roman marble sculpture discovered near Porta S. Giovanni, Rome and now in the Uffizi, Florence. The Roman sculpture was, itself, discovered to be after a lost Hellenistic bronze group of the third century B.C., either of the Pergamene school or the circle of Lysippus (F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique - The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 337-339, no. 94).
This lot appears in Claudio Bravo's painting Luchadores, 1985 (P. Bowels and M. Vargas Llosa, Claudio Bravo Pinturas y Dibujos, Madrid, 1996, p. 133).