2024 Summer Olympics Art Tribute
Another four years has slipped by us. The good news is that means it’s Summer Olympics time. While Paris welcomes over 10,000 athletes from 204 countries, the world awaits the thrills that the Olympic Games are sure to deliver over 19 days of intense competitions. There will be 329 events in 32 sports.
At Quent Cordair Fine Art we celebrate the athletes past and present. We even created a page on our website in tribute to Olympic athletes that features paintings and sculptures of some of the original Olympians, both real and mythological.
The Swimmer
cast bronze by Danielle Anjou at Quent Cordair Fine Art.
The collection includes Olympic divers, swimmers, boxers, gymnasts, Prometheus, Athena, and more.
The ancient Olympic games were held around 776 BCE on the Peloponnese in ancient Greece. These Games took place every four years, a period which became known as an ‘Olympiad’.
Did you know that participants had to be male, of Greek origin and freeborn, and all athletes competed naked? (see Danielle Anjou’s Olympian sculptures.) Wrestlers competed covered in oil, there were no weight classes in boxing, and anyone false-starting on the track faced corporal punishment.
Modern Olympic Games have gone through a lot of changes since their inception more than 120 years ago. Tug-of-war has come and gone as an Olympic sport, and nobody’s shooting live pigeons anymore.
The Hammer Thrower
by Danielle Anjou at Quent Cordair Fine Art
The Archer
by Danielle Anjou at Quent Cordair Fine Art
Winners were rewarded with a wreath or crown of leaves and became heroes. (see Bryan Larsen’s Triumph of Man and Triumph of Woman)
What about the women?
Women competed in the first Harean Games that may have taken place in 776 BCE.
The Heraea was an ancient Greek festival in which young girls competed in a footrace, possibly as a puberty or pre-nuptial initiation ritual. The race was held every four years at Olympia.
The winners were awarded a crown of olive leaves and a portion of a cow which was sacrificed to Hera.
The ancient Olympic Games ended in 393 AD, more than 1,000 years later.
The first modern Summer Olympics, founded in 1894 by Pierre de Coubertin, also known as the Games of the I Olympiad, were held in Greece in 1896, and were attended by as many as 280 athletes, all male, from 12 countries. The athletes competed in 43 events covering athletics (track and field), cycling, swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting, wrestling, fencing, shooting, and tennis.The Paris 2024 Olympics will mark the 33rd edition of the modern Games, though three of those did not take place because of World War One and World War Two.
Fire of the Gods
by Bryan Larsen at Quent Cordair Fine Art. Prints available.