Parthenon Aphrodite and Dione
by Weston Westmoreland
Title
Parthenon Aphrodite and Dione
Artist
Weston Westmoreland
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Aphrodite and Dione. East Pediment, Parthenon. Athens, Greece. Pheidias, 438-432 BC.
The east pediment of the Parthenon showed the birth of the goddess Athena from the head of her father Zeus. The centre of the scene was occupied by the statues of Zeus and Athena. It takes place on Mt Olympus in the presence of the other gods who watch standing, sitting or half-reclining on either side and filling the triangular space of the gable end of the temple. The pediments' corners contained the chariots of Helios (Sun), which emerges from the sea, and Selene (Moon), which sinks in the ocean waves, indicating thus that the goddess' birth takes place at dawn. This is the head of one of Selene's team of horses, which occupied the corner of the gable.
The two women are carved on the same piece of marble. To the left Dione, sitting on a rock, slightly turns her back towards the centre of the pediment where the scene of Athena's birth takes place. She is dressed in a chiton with short sleeves, secured over her arms with small buttons in relief. With her right arm she would embrace Aphrodite, who lies languidly on the same rock, resting against her mother’s lap. Aphrodite’s chiton clings onto her body forming rich folds, while its upper part slips down exposing her shoulder. A small drill on her right wrist would have served for the attachment of a bronze bracelet. The heads and hand and feet extremities of both figures are missing. The statues were carved in Marble from Penteli.
The Parthenon was richly decorated with sculptures, designed by the famous artist Pheidias, which took until 432 BC to complete.
The Parthenon was the temple of Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece. Athena was the protector Goddess of Athens, so the Parthenon was the greatest temple of the most important state-city of ancient Greece (Sparta was as strong and prominent,or more, as Athens, but from the perspective of architecture, the Athenians were infinitely superior).
Construction of the Parthenon began in 447 BC when the Athenian Empire was at the peak of its power. It was completed in 438 BC, although decoration of the building continued until 432 BC. It is the most important surviving building of Classical Greece. Its decorative sculptures are considered some of the high points of Greek art.
The Parthenon is regarded as an enduring symbol of Ancient Greece, Athenian democracy and Western civilization. To the Athenians who built it, the Parthenon and other Periclean monuments of the Acropolis were seen fundamentally as a celebration of Hellenic victory over the Persian invaders and as a thanksgiving to the gods for that victory.
The Parthenon itself replaced an older temple of Athena destroyed in the Persian invasion of 480 BC. Like most Greek temples, the Parthenon served as the city treasury, later of the whole Athenian Empire. Nine the Parthenon became a Christian church.
After the Ottoman conquest, it was turned into a mosque in the early 1460s. The Parthenon endured the pass of the centuries largely unscathed until 1687, when the joined effort of the Venetians who bombarded the Acropolis and the Ottomans who kept ammunition inside the temple contrived to severely damage the building and its sculptures.
In 1800 Thomas Bruce removed some of the surviving sculptures, now known as the Elgin Marbles, with the alleged permission of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. This invaluable heritage of Greece is now "protected" in the British Museum, where you should go if you wanted to stand in front of these four horsemen.
More amazing statues, sculptures and carvings at https://weston-westmoreland.pixels.com/collections/statues+sculptures+carvings
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Weston Westmoreland
Uploaded
October 12th, 2023
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