Parthenon Frieze Horsemen
by Weston Westmoreland
Title
Parthenon Frieze Horsemen
Artist
Weston Westmoreland
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Parthenon North Frieze Horsemen, Athens, Greece, 440 BC.
Detail of four horsemen galloping along the north frieze of the Athenian Parthenon. The whole frieze was originally painted and gilded over, but the paint was washed away by time and the gilding was sacked.
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.
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Weston Westmoreland
Uploaded
April 17th, 2020
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