Wrestlers (sculpture)

The two young men are engaged in the pankration, a kind of wrestling similar to the present-day sport of mixed martial arts.

Not every 20th-century viewer admired "a work once famous and now unfairly neglected", as art historian Kenneth Clark said of it: "If we can bring our eyes to rest on the unpleasant surface of a somewhat lifeless replica, we discover that the original must have been a Lysippic bronze of masterly complexity and condensation.

[5] Currently the sculpture is considered to be the best-quality Roman copy from a lost original Hellenistic bronze of the third century BCE, either of the Pergamene school or the circle of Lysippus.

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.

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.