Wrestlers

In 1583 workmen digging in a Roman vineyard near the Porta San Giovanni turned up a tangle of ancient marble: two naked men locked in a wrestling hold. It was a Roman copy, carved in the first century BC, of a Greek bronze made some three centuries earlier and long since lost. Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici snapped it up for his villa in Rome, and eventually it came to Florence to stand among the treasures of the Tribuna, the octagonal jewel-room at the heart of the Uffizi. The two figures are caught in pankration, the brutal Greek contest of grappling and blows that entered the Olympic games in 648 BC. Much of what you see was pieced back together by restorers, which was normal for antiquities pulled broken from the earth.