Athena Parthenos

Attributed to Phidias and dated to the mid-fifth century BCE, it was an offering from the city of Athens to Athena, its tutelary deity.

Many artists and craftsmen worked on the realization of the sculpture, which was probably built around a core of cypress wood, and then paneled with gold and ivory plates.

She was helmeted and held a large round shield and spear, placed on the ground to her left, next to her sacred snake.

[1] After their victories in Salamis and Plataea, the Athenians had sworn not to complete the destroyed temples but to leave them as they were, in memory of the Persian "barbarism".

[2] In the succeeding years, however, Athens grew to control much of the region through its domination of the Delian League, a confederation of Greek states originally designed to protect themselves against the Persians.

By 454 BCE, the Delian treasury had been relocated to Athens, where the money was funnelled into an ambitious plan to rebuild the city and its destroyed temples, including the Parthenon.

The room was 29.90 m long, or around one hundred Athenian feet, by 19 m wide, with a ceiling height of 12.50 m.[8] The new building was not intended to become a temple, but a treasury meant to house the colossal chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos.

However, given the cost of precious materials (gold and ivory), it could also have been installed elsewhere, at the foot of the sacred rock, far from the comings and goings of the main site and its dust.

[13] The statue was likely made of "spare parts", perhaps first mounted in the workshop, then dismantled, moved to the Parthenon, after its completion, and installed in its final place.

[13] The remaining accounts make it possible to estimate the cost of the work at 704 talents, or the equivalent of 200 Triremes (the city's naval power base).

It was needed for the face, arms, and feet of the statue, as well as for the gorgon's head depicted on the goddess's chest.

On an inscription of 440-439 BCE there is recorded the purchase of an unknown amount of elephant ivory for the sum of 24 talents and 743 silver drachmas.

[21] If the gold plates were probably directly nailed to the frame, the more fragile ivory was certainly fixed more delicately with dowels or glued with fish glue[N 8].

In front of her, a large basin filled with water played several roles: it was used to maintain a sufficient degree of humidity in the room (to conserve ivory) and it also had to reflect the external light and illuminate the work.

Phidias' idea was apparently to represent the goddess under her "true" aspect, in all her majesty, beauty, magnificence, or even in her real size, since the gods were considered proportionally much greater than humans.

[31] The Athena wore a half-open peplos on the right side, as was the rule for female representations in the first half of the fifth century BCE.

However, her posture was new (in the canon that Polykleitos would then develop for his athlete statues): the left leg was a little bent, the knee forward, the heel not posing on the ground.

[26][27][10] Over her peplos, she bore at the breast the aegis lined with snakes and within its centre, at the level of the solar plexus, an ivory gorgoneion.

It was a reinterpretation of the korai hairstyle, the archaic statues of young women abundantly dedicated to the goddess on the acropolis of Athens.

The edge of her sandals ("Etruscan" type), about 20 cm high, was decorated with a painted or carved centauromachy, the sources do not allow a conclusive answer.

The column is present in copies where it is necessary for reasons of the balance of terracotta or marble, but its existence for the original statue remains much discussed.

According to Plutarch[N 12], Phidias represented himself among the Athenians, in the centre at the top, as a bald old man preparing to throw the stone held with two hands above his head.

[9][37] The three fights represented on the statue (centauromachy, gigantomachy, and amazonomachy) were also found on the carved decoration of the Parthenon.

[38][39] The snake (δράκων), perhaps represented the Chthonian powers that would have been present on the acropolis from the beginning, or even Erichthonios himself whom the goddess had raised on her sacred rock.

[40][41] In fact, the monsters (sphinx, gryphons, winged horses, snakes, and gorgonians) that adorn the statue of the deity symbolize these primitive forces she domesticated.

[28] The themes chosen to decorate this statue, as well as those that adorned the entire building, were part of an iconographic and political program of the celebration of the city through its guardian goddess.

[42] Ivory, a fragile material and subject to desiccation, was maintained with oiled water that was left available in a basin at the foot of the statue.

[43] The luxury of the statue contrasted with its interior filled, like all chryselephantine statues, with "levers, corners, nails that cross the machine from side to side, ankles, pitch, clay and other things as shocking to the eye, not to mention an infinity of flies or shrews", as Lucian describes in Dream or the Rooster, XXIV.18.

If his gesture was a simple "borrowing" from Athena, the rule was to repay with interest, difficult if the only way to obtain funds was to strip the goddess.

Thus, gold medallions from a tomb in Kul-Oba (Crimea) and preserved in the Hermitage Museum, reproduce the head of the statue.