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A nude athlete and a python are shown locked in violent combat in this statuette by Frederic Leighton. This is a smaller edition of the life-size version first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877. Leighton was an established Academician by this time and a respected figure in the British art world, but was a painter first and foremost, and Athlete wrestling with a Python was his first experimentation with sculpture.

The resulting work was hugely influential. It was a founding work of a movement called New Sculpture, which was a turning point in the history of sculpture in Britain. By experimenting with new approaches and techniques, New Sculpture artists took sculpture in a whole new direction. Instead of using marble, the material favoured by the Neo Classical sculptors, they started to revive interest in bronze casting techniques.

The use of bronze allowed them to pay greater attention to surface texture and naturalistic details; and to inject more energy and dynamism into their sculptural forms. The lively, twisting pose of Leighton’s Athlete would have been difficult to achieve in marble. While Leighton did later agree for his work to be replicated in marble, additional supports had to be included to hold the weight of the leg.

As a subject matter, the struggle between man and python has roots in Classical antiquity. The famous Laocoön sculpture in Rome, which shows three men being crushed by snakes, is one which Leighton would have been aware of when creating this work. But his treatment of the subject was innovative and exciting. The work took on iconic status in Victorian Britain, and was so widely known that it was often used in cartoons, advertisements, and referenced in other works of art.

For some, the work is associated with the expression of queer identity. The depiction of athletic male nudes was often associated with notions of moral strength, discipline and ‘straight’ or traditional masculinity in the 19th century. But this work was widely admired in small circles or subcultures in which homosexual desires were apparent. Photographs of the work were exchanged in secret, and it has been claimed that owning a copy of the work could have been understood by some as a code for alternative or queer identities. There is no proof that Leighton had same-sex relationships, but his sexuality has been subject to speculation.

New sculpture is a name applied to the sculptures produced by a group of artists working in the second half of the nineteenth century The term was coined by critic Edmund Gosse in an 1876 article in Art Journal titled The New Sculpture in which he identified this new trend in sculpture. Its distinguishing qualities were a new dynamism and energy as well as physical realism, mythological or exotic subject matter and use of symbolism, as opposed to prevailing style of frozen neoclassicism. It can be considered part of symbolism. The keynote work was seen by Gosse as Lord Fredrick Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python, but the key artist was Sir Alfred Gilbert followed by Sir George Frampton. An Important precursor was Michelangelesque work of Alfred Stevens.