A ROMAN BRONZE ATHENA PROMACHOS

CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

细节

A ROMAN BRONZE ATHENA PROMACHOS
CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.
Archaistic in style, the goddess striding forward with her left leg advanced, her right arm raised to brandish a now-missing spear, her separately-made and now-missing left arm originally lowered and holding a shield, wearing her aegis over a long chiton and a mantle with a cascade of zigzag folds along her right leg, her aegis forming a semicircular breastplate fronted by a gorgoneion, and hanging down in back to below her buttocks, the sides tied around her waist as a belt, with a snakey fringe and incised scale pattern, her Attic helmet with a peaked visor, topped by a crouching sphinx supporting the large crest, her hair framing her face and falling in a long pointed mass along her back, with long tendrils falling onto her shoulders, her eyes inlaid in silver, on the original rectangular plinth
9 1/8 in. (23.2 cm.) high

来源

D. Zimmerman, Geneva.
with Royal-Athena Galleries, New York, 1990.

出版

C.C. Vermeule and J.M. Eisenberg, Catalogue of the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Bronzes in the Collection of John Kluge, New York and Boston, 1992, no. 90-07.

展览

From Olympus to the Underworld, Ancient Bronzes from the John W. Kluge Collection, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 26 March - 23 June 1996.

拍品专文

Athena Promachos as a statue type was already known in the Archaic Period. The most famous was Pheidias's colossal bronze from the 5th century B.C that stood on the Athenian Acropolis, although this version depicted the goddess standing rather than striding. The type that the Morven bronze replicates is best known from a fragmentary marble in Dresden and bronzes in London and Vienna (see pp. 45-52 and pls. 18-20 in Fullerton, The Archaistic Style in Roman Statuary). All share the same treatment of the mantle and aegis, and the bronzes, too, have a sphinx atop the helmet. According to A. Herrmann (p. 266 in True, et al., A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art from the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman, where there is a slightly different version) the type "has been considered either the neo-Attic adaptation of an early fifth-century original, or an invention of the late second-first century B.C."