Fragments of a marble statue of the Diadoumenos (youth tying a fillet around his head)

This marble figure shows a young athlete tying a victory fillet (ribbon) around his head. It's a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze by Polykleitos of Sikyon, one of the most celebrated sculptors of antiquity. "Diadoumenos" means "the man who is tying or binding."

Over 40 ancient copies of this composition survive, all replicating the lost original from around 430 BCE. Polykleitos authored the Kanon, the most famous ancient treatise on ideal human proportions. Roman workshops used plaster molds taken from Greek originals to produce copies that could be shipped anywhere in the empire.

This version stands 73 inches (185.4 cm) tall in Gallery 162 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Missing sections were supplemented with casts from a marble copy found on the island of Delos, now in the National Museum in Athens.