Athena Lemnia

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Cast of the Athena Lemnia torso of the Albertinum Dresden in the Moscow Pushkin Museum

Athena Lemnia is the name for an Athena statue by Phidias . According to popular belief, the sculptor created the bronze statue of the goddess around 450/440 BC. For the colonists who moved from Athens to Lemnos .

history

The original of the Athena Lemnia has not survived. However, there are statues that are considered replicas of this work and that have led to conclusions about the original appearance of Athena Lemnia.

Erika Simon names the Acropolis in Athens as the original location of Athena Lemnia and cites ancient writers who mentioned the monumental work: among others, these were Pausanias and Lukian of Samosata . Pausanias describes the Athena Lemnia in his description of Greece as the most remarkable work of Phidias and explains that the statue of Athena was named after its founder: τῶν ἔργων τῶν Φειδίου θέας μάλιστα ἄξιλλας αθηντα ἄξιλλον Ἀθηνᾶς ἄνητντναντέντέ ῶντωντέντῶντῶντντντντέντῶντντέντῶντέ έντντν έντω ένττν It is possible that Pliny the Elder also had this statue in mind when he declared that Phidias had created such a successful representation of Athena that it was nicknamed "forma".

John Boardman , who “ finds efforts to discover early works by Phidias, the Parthenon master, even in copies, […] perhaps not completely inappropriate”, gives a lecture on the parts of an Athena that can be found in the Albertinum in Dresden and in the city museum of Bologna are: "Many have taken this to be a copy of a bronze that Phidias made for the colonists of Lemnos [...] [...] Another researcher, however, connected it with the Riace bronzes and the Phidian group of Delphi ."

Furtwängler's attempt at reconstruction

Erika Simon still assumes that Furtwängler succeeded in a convincing reconstruction of the Greek work of art based on a Roman marble copy. In 1893 the archaeologist had two statue heads connected with two torsos. He had at his disposal the statue head from Bologna, which until then was only known as the girl's head, or a reproduction of it, for which there was a poorly preserved counterpart in Dresden, and in Dresden there were two very similar athenet torsos. Furtwängler had heads and torsos connected and added the arms and their attributes. This resulted in still images with a height of a little more than two meters.

The statue head from Bologna has a wavy hairstyle with a central parting, which is held by a wide ribbon. He shows the hairstyle typical of the classical era . The torso is clothed in an Attic peplos with robbery; a cord serves as a belt. The diagonally belted Aegis with the Gorgoneion pointing to the left has a scale pattern and is framed by writhing snakes. A part of the left upper arm has been preserved, which is angled approximately horizontally from the shoulder, while the right upper arm probably hung down and there must have been an object in the right hand that was facing Athena's gaze.

In Furtwängler's reconstruction, which is in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, Athene holds her helmet in her right hand and looks at it thoughtfully. With her left hand she is holding up a spear, the rear end of which is propped on the ground.

Athena without a helmet with an owl on a picture of Duris

Despite her actually positive assessment of this reconstruction attempt, Simon asks whether the Athena Lemnia actually held her helmet in her right hand and not some other object. She argues: "Although Athena has her helmet in her hand in a whole series of vase pictures, but not to look at it: Her gaze is then rather directed towards someone opposite, because removing the helmet was a gesture of her epiphany ." Simon could also have held Athena Lemnia as an attribute of an owl in his lost right hand: “For the Attic colonists who moved to Lemnos, the sacred bird of Athena, which sat on their right hand ready to fly, would have been a favorable omen. “As an argument for this theory, Simon cites, among other things, a vase picture of Duris , on which a helmetless Athena pours the exhausted Heracles wine with one hand and holds her symbolic animal with the other. She wears her aegis in such a way that the terrifying head of Medusa is covered by the owl's face. Erika Simon underpins her argument with the nickname “glaukopis” or “gorgopis” for Athene and says: “The owl face must have been a kind of“ positive ”Gorgoneion for the Greeks, a sign of luck. At the statue of Athena Lemnia, if our new supplementary proposal was correct, this gaze would have been reinforced by the gaze of "glaukopis" Athena. In contrast, the Gorgoneion on the diagonally belted Aegis turns away from the viewer to the left of the goddess, the unfortunate side ”. But Erika Simon does not want to completely reject the theory that Athena Lemnia held her helmet in her right hand.

Criticism of Furtwängler and other theories

The fact that head and torso originally really belonged together or that Furtwängler's attempt at reconstruction had anything to do with the original Athena Lemnia is now disputed. Soon after Furtwängler's publication on the reconstruction attempts, Jamot pointed out that z. B. the size of the head did not match that of the torso; Amelung confirmed the seriousness of his objections and expanded them by declaring that the head was more Argive than Attic and thus did not fit in with a work by Phidias. Hartwick undertook several studies to further substantiate the objections to Furtwängler's reconstruction. Against these attempts by Hartwick, Olga Palagia cited a relief from Epidaurus and a statuette from the Athenian Acropolis, in which a representation of Athene, similar to that reconstructed by Furtwängler, is reflected. Hartwick rejected this because the statuette, like the Dresden torsos, is armless, so the addition of the helmet is only based on the assumptions of the reconstructor. Only in the relief is Athena holding her helmet in her hand. Hartwick also referred to an exchange of letters between Furtwängler and Georg Treu , in which the joining of the heads with the torsos was discussed and which at least makes it appear doubtful that the heads originally belonged to the torsos.

Harrison finally pleaded for an identity of Athena Lemnia with the so-called Athena Medici. She wears a peplos and a helmet, in her left hand she holds a shield and spear, in her right a phial . A relief from Ostia shows an Athena of this type in connection with a depiction of Hephaestus , who is thrown from Olympus as a child and lands near Lemnos. After discovering that the aegis girded at an angle could well be a Roman creation, which does not say anything about the original design of the lost Phidias statue, Hartwick concluded in 1998 with the words: “[…] even this must be accepted with caution, for there is not enough hard information to be certain of the appearance of this Pheidian statue. We need to keep our eyes and minds open to other possibilities and suggestions. The final word, I am sure, has not yet been written. "

According to a more recent theory, Phidias' portrayal of Athena also indicated the connection to Hephaistus, but it was not an Athena Medici, but an Athena Ergane . Because, according to Peter Gercke in his text on the Athenetorso in the Kassler Antikensammlung , the “proposals to identify other types of figures with the Lemnia - Athena type Medici (Harrison 1996) or Athena type Fier / Berlin / Richmond (Meyer 1997) - are lacking of motivic and mythical- aitiological evidence for a Lemnian consecration. The new iconographic interpretation of the Dresden-Kassel figure type as Ergane reinforces the equation with the pheidic ›Lemnia‹. "

Web links

Commons : Athena Lemnia  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1,28,2 ( online ).
  2. Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia 34,54; quoted in: Ortrun Deutschmann: Athena Lemnia . archaeosammlungen.uni-graz.at, accessed on November 15, 2016.
  3. ^ A b John Boardman (ed.): Reclam's history of ancient art. Reclam, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-15-010432-7 , p. 110.
  4. A third torso, which seems closely related to these two Dresden works of art and has the same dimensions, is in Kassel.
  5. a b The Dresden Athena Lemnia. ( Memento of the original from November 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. skd-online-collection.skd.museum, accessed on November 15, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / skd-online-collection.skd.museum
  6. See Ortrun Deutschmann: Athena Lemnia . archaeosammlungen.uni-graz.at, accessed on November 15, 2016. Hartswick assumes that the head is also of Roman origin.
  7. a b c Erika Simon: The gods of the Greeks. 2nd edition, Hirmer, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-7774-3160-5 , p. 207.
  8. ^ Athena Lemnia . www.goddess-athena.org, accessed November 15, 2016.
  9. Kim J. Hartswick: The Athena Lemnia Reconsidered. In: American Journal of Archeology , Volume 87, Number 3, July 1983, pp. 335-346.
  10. Illustration of the relief on bdsae.org , accessed on November 15, 2016.
  11. Kim J. Hartswick: Stephanos. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology, Philadelphia 1998, ISBN 978-0-924171-52-9 , pp. 105–112, here p. 112 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  12. ^ Peter Gercke: Athena ›Lemnia‹ type Dresden-Kassel. antikeskulptur.museum-kassel.de, accessed on November 15, 2016.