Pediments of the Parthenon

Pausanias, a Greek geographer, described their subjects: to the east, the birth of Athena, and to the west the quarrel between her and Poseidon to become the tutelary deity of Athens.

Considered the archetype of classical sculpture, or even the embodiment of ideal beauty, several of the statues were removed from the building by Lord Elgin's agents in the early nineteenth century and transported to the British Museum in London.

The accounts of the construction of the Parthenon make it possible to know that the marble intended for the pediments began to be extracted from the quarries of Mount Pentelikon in 439–438 BC.

[5] Due to the size of the construction site (about fifty carved statues in half a dozen years), many artists must have worked there, as the differences of style and techniques show.

[3][9] Deep rectangular grooves at the corners of pediments could indicate the presence in these places of a lift-type mechanism for mounting statues.

Thus, was delimited a long space of 28.35 m and high (in its center) of 3.428 m or 3.47 m to a depth of 0.90 m. All the statues were installed on the horizontal cornice which exceeded in overhanging of 70 cm, placed either on a plinth or on a laying bed.

In order to make them more visible, because of the angle of vision, some of the statues were inclined outwards, as in Olympia, and sometimes up to 30 cm above the void.

They were held by iron props that sank to one side in the plinth of the statue and the other deep in the horizontal cornice and tympanum.

[5][12] In addition, the traveler gives no detail outside the general theme while he describes in a very precise way the pediments of the temple of Zeus in Olympia.

[5] The number of statues and the very precise myths evoked makes Bernard Ashmole[N 4] wonder if the contemporaries themselves were really capable of identifying all the characters.

[13] To the west, on the "minor" facade, was the quarrel between Athena and Poseidon for Athens and Attica and the victory of the Virgin Goddess, one of the great local myths.

[21] The violence of the divine confrontation can be read in the tension of the tense bodies which are recoiling backward, as in the famous group Athena and Marsyas of Myron, dedicated on the acropolis a few years earlier.

[8][21][25][27] The statue of the Ilissos is of very high quality in its rendering of the anatomical details and in its movement: it seems to be extracted from the ground while turning towards the central scene.

The idea of simple "spectator" statues sitting on the exteriors and then of river gods was also borrowed from the sanctuary in the Peloponnese.

[11] The western statues B, C, L, Q and perhaps W have been copied and adapted to adorn one of the pediments of the temple of Eleusis (smaller than that of the Parthenon), completed in the second century and representing the abduction of Persephone.

[21] The east pediment, on the most sacred facade, evokes the birth of Athena before the other gods together, a theme already developed in the decor of ceramics, but never yet in sculpture.

[28][29][30] In fact, there remain traces of three large metal supports of a very heavy statue: Zeus was then seated, either on his throne or on a rock at the top of Olympus.

In addition, the decor of a Roman well of the first century (Putéal de la Moncloa) preserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain evokes the presence of Moirai.

She is dressed in a peplos and approaches two other female figures (east E and F), sitting on folded cloths placed on chests (detail only visible from behind).

However, the pattern of the chiton slipping subtly revealing the shoulder is seen here on east K and M. It is also on west C, identified with Pandrosus and the representation of Artemis on the eastern frieze.

[36] Brinkmann and Koch-Brinkmann argue that east K, L and M show two Horai and the locality of Attika, which was usually called Attike.

[38][39] Block 19 of the eastern pediment's horizontal cornice was damaged and repaired in Roman times, but there is no evidence of restoration work on a statue.

[40] At the time of the transformation of the Parthenon into a church, somewhere in the sixth or the seventh century, the statues of the center of the eastern pediment were removed to make way for the apse.

[5] In 1674, an artist in the service of the Marquis de Nointel (French ambassador to the Sublime Porte), very probably Jacques Carrey, made fairly accurate coloured drawings of both pediments.

[18][40][41][42] On 26 September 1687, during the siege of Athens by the Venetians commanded by Francesco Morosini, the explosion of the powder reserve installed in the Parthenon greatly damaged the pediments.

Morosini was then ordered by the Venetian Senate to return to the Serenissima the "work of art considered the most important and the most refined."

[5] The fate of the other fragments varied: some were used as building material for houses built on the acropolis; others were bought by European collectors passing through Athens during their Grand Tour.

Ludwig Ross then argued in Das Theseion und der Tempel des Arcs (1852) that these existed in both the east and west pediments of the Parthenon.

Francis Penrose provided evidence as regards the existence of sculptures on the west pediment in his Principles of Athenian Architecture (1851).

This led Adolf Bötticher to surmise that only the west pediments had this feature, Untersuchungen auf der Akropolis (1863).