The whims of Olympus - The myth of Athena, Marsyas and Apollo

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Under the title Die Launen des Olymp - The Myth of Athena, Marsyas and Apollo , an exhibition was held in 2008 in the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt am Main , which was dedicated to the myth of Marsyas .

One of the most famous exhibits at the Frankfurt Liebieghaus is a group of figures showing the satyr Marsyas and the goddess Athena , both figures from Greek mythology . This modern bronze group, a reconstruction of the ancient Athena Marsyas group by the sculptor Myron from around 450 BC. BC, welcomes visitors to the museum in the garden of the museum villa. In the antiques department of the permanent exhibition there is also a Roman marble copy of Athena from the first half of the 1st century AD, which belonged to such a group of figures. From May 22 to September 21, 2008, the Liebieghaus presented various forms of representation of the myth in a special exhibition. Various loans from other museums have been made available for this purpose. The most important loan was a marble copy of Marsys from the Vatican Museums , which also belonged to a Roman copy of the Myron group and was presented here together with the Frankfurt Athena.

On loan from the Louvre. Front of a Roman sarcophagus with Apollo and Marsyas. Late 3rd century

Other lenders were the Louvre from Paris, the British Museum in London, the State Collection of Antiquities in Munich, the Collection of Antiquities in Berlin , the Capitoline Museums in Rome, the Sculpture Collection in Dresden, the Museum Landscape Hessen Kassel , the Antikenmuseum and Ludwig Collection in Basel, the Antikenmuseum the University of Heidelberg , the Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe, the National Archaeological Museum in Naples , the Städel from Frankfurt and the antique collection of the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg.

A total of 81 exhibits were shown, 38 of which were from third-party lenders. These included several fragments of other Roman copies of the Myron statue group, Greek vases by the Berlin painter , the Pan painter , the Lydos , the Lycurgus painter , the Suessola painter , the Villa Giulia painter , the Nikosthenes painter , the Harrow Painter , the Euaion Painter , the Amasis Painter , the Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew by Stefan Lochner and a female ideal portrait by Sandro Botticelli . The exhibition was funded by Techem AG, the Hessian Cultural Foundation and the Ernst von Siemens Art Fund . Media partners were the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau and the radio station hr2-kultur .

The concept of the exhibition was created by the head of the antique department of the Liebieghaus, Vinzenz Brinkmann . He is also the editor of a 186-page catalog. Heike Höcherl was in charge of the project. In addition to Brinkmann, Jochen Sander, Susanne Muth , Gabriele Kaminski, Stefan Hagel, Egert Pöhlmann and Clemens Schmidlin contributed to the catalog. The exhibition first illuminated the myth of Marsyas, Athene and Apollon . Then the group of figures of Myron was presented. The third point of the exhibition was the reception of the myth of Marsyas and Apollo in the Renaissance and Baroque periods . After that the god Apollo was accepted as "avenger"; other ancient myths, such as the story of the Niobids , were also shown. The next section of the exhibition was devoted to the representation and perception of violence in antiquity. A final large section of the exhibition dealt with ancient music in myth and reality.

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