Roman marble statue depicting a young boxer wearing the famous boxing gloves of the imperial era, the caesti, dating back to the 1st century AD, is now temporarily visible in the collection of the National Roman Museum, in Palazzo Altemps, in Rome.
The statue came to light in 1739 during the excavations carried out for the construction of a wing of the palace of Cardinal Antonio Gentili, in the area of the current Via del Tritone, at the intersection with the Umberto I Tunnel, in Rome. The area, rich in ancient villas and past aristocratic residences of the Roman era, has returned over the centuries various ornamental statues, including those of athletes from classical antiquity.
The statue of the boxer was part of the Albani collection, later passed to the architect Gaetano Koch, and in 1941 purchased by the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, on the instructions of Arturo Osio, of which it is the current owner. Since 2019, the bank has given the work on loan for five years to the National Roman Museum. The collaboration between BNL and the National Roman Museum was born from the common desire to share with a wider audience the attraction and interest aroused by these works of ancient sculpture, contributing to spreading knowledge of ancient history.
It’s hoped that the statue will be donated to the National Roman Museum in the future, becoming part of the permanent collection of the Italian institution.
Many scholars have claimed that the work is a Roman copy of a Greek original in bronze, by a sculptor of the school of Polykleitos, from the 4th century BC, but the purely Roman gloves deny this attestation.
The beauty of the work is highlighted above all in the soft shading of the muscle masses and the delicate modeling. The boxer, with a thin and slender physique, shows still immature muscles, showing us the young age of the boy who wears the caesti, a type of heavy "gloves".
The caestus is a Roman invention, one of the different types of "gloves" used in events organized in the imperial age, where the violent and brutal extremism of competitive boxing competitions of Greek origin, developed different forms of boxing that were part of the sporting spectacles of antiquity.
We know little about the use of this type of glove and the technical, methodological, and regulatory developments that the use of this type of tool required to comply with the logic of such athletic events.
The term caestus (plural caesti) which finds its meaning in the derivation from basket, basket, container but also belt, band, is a term used by the Romans both in its generic form, to simply indicate the boxing "glove", but similarly by Latin writers, narrators, and authors, close to athletics, to specify the glove with the insert, perhaps in metal, with a rounded shape.
The glove represented in the sculpture is composed of ropes that form a kind of "harness" around the upper part of the knuckles of the closed fist; gripped by the thumb there is a band perhaps in leather or bronze, similar to a semi-cylindrical basket, in the shape of a horseshoe, attached to gloves, perhaps in leather. On the upper part of the glove, there is a wool part, indicated as summus vellus, synonymous with the Greek kòdion, which was used to cleanse oneself of sweat, and a protruding joint, tied with cords that start from the wrist.
The blunt joint is a real mystery; its use and the material with which it was produced are unknown.