Wrestlers (sculpture) - Rediscovery

Rediscovery

The discovery of The Wrestlers caused such an immediate sensation among the cognoscenti of Rome, that the event can be dated to the very end of March or beginning of April 1583, in a vigna belonging to the Tommasini da Gallese family near Porta San Giovanni, Rome, together with the group of individual sculptures called the Niobids. Circumstances of their discovery, and the fact that the heads were missing, led early antiquarians—and the engravers who worked to their direction—to group the paired figures with these Niobids.

Within days of their excavation, Valerio Cioli, a sculptor and restorer of Roman antiquities in Rome, was writing to the secretary of Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, to alert his patron to the discovery, and the Medici lost no time: on 25 June the group, and the Niobids were purchased from a member of the Varese family, who had managed to gain possession of them in the intervening weeks, by the Grand Duke's brother (and eventual heir) Ferdinando Cardinal de' Medici, who took it to add to the outstanding gallery of antiquities at Villa Medici. There it was illustrated in an engraving of 1594. From there it has come to reside in the Galerie degli Uffizi, with the rest of the Medici collections, where it was a main feature of the Tribuna of the Uffizi.

The sculpture has been reproduced in marble, bronze and plaster, and in modern times cast in resin, both in full size and in miniature, and the subject in general was treated by Michelangelo. Philippe Magnier produced a marble copy of the group ca 1684-87 for the gardens of Versailles - it was later moved to Marly, and is now in the Louvre.