Jovens espartanos exercitando-se

This is Degas before Degas, years before the ballet dancers and the racecourses. He began it around 1860, when he was still an ambitious young history painter, and he kept returning to it for decades. It was still in his studio, unfinished, when he died in 1917. The scene comes from the Greek writer Plutarch, who described how Spartan girls were made to exercise in the open and to taunt the boys into competing harder. On the left the girls call out, on the right the boys square up, and behind them the elders look on. Degas gives the figures plain, un-idealised bodies, more like lean Paris youths than classical gods. Scholars still cannot agree whether the two groups are competing or flirting.