Unbalanced poses and references to the Severe style seem to have been in fashion during the early decades of the fourth century. The attitude of the feet of the Herakles is virtually identical with the footprints preserved on a series of bases of lost bronzes by the Argive-Sicyonian school[25].
As far as preserved statues go, the Herakles clearly owes much to a type of Hermes known in many copies and ascribed by Stewart to Naukydes, but the affinities that are by far the most striking are clearly with the Athena Rospigliosi[26]. Not only are the two very closely related in pose, but each develops its full potential only when seen in three-quarter view; to some extent both pieces also suffer from a division of interest between the two sides of the statue.
However, the mood of the Herakles has undergone a subtle change; he is calmer, less restless than the Athena, whose emotion seems rather overstated, at least in the Uffizi copy. At this point the average quality of the Los Angeles statue lets us down, but to judge from the Genzano herm the mood was one of heroic endurance, by which the sculptor, seeking to enlist the sympathy of the observer, strove to create an atmosphere around the statue and to draw him into it. Yet for all this there is a ambivalent note about the figure which cannot be denied and which stamps it as an early work, perhaps carved only a year or two after the Athena, that is, c. 370 or even earlier; at this point Skopas would have been about twenty or twenty-five years old.
Conclusion
Although scholars were sure that the statue of Herakles then in Lansdowne House (El: PLATE 42a – c ) had no connection with the Genzano type (Al, 3: PLATES 30 – 31 ) the two types have since become conflated, despite the lack of a wreath in the former, and serious discrepancies in the proportions, the structure of the head and the treatment of the hair and eyes[27]. The Lansdowne statue, furthermore, does not agree with the figure on the Sicyonian coin (A21: PLATE 31d). Few direct copies of it in fact exist, although the considerable number of eclectic types dependent upon it and the Los Angeles statue have confused the issue enormously in recent years.
