Athena Lemnia at The Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen by Marchal Geoffrey

Description

The Lemnian Athena, or Athena Lemnia, was a classical Greek statue of the goddess Athena. According to Pausanias (1.28.2), the original bronze was created by Phidias circa 450-440 BCE, for Athenians living on Lemnos to dedicate on the Acropolis inAthens, Greece. It is unclear whether any copies remain. In 1891 Adolf Furtwängler reconstructed two virtually identical, Roman marble statues which he claimed as copies of the original, and identified two Roman marble copies of the head alone. These completed statues were recreated by joining a poorly preserved marble head (Dresden) and a plaster cast of a similar Roman marble head, from the collection of Pelagio Palagi (Bologna), to a pair of identical bodies in Dresden. Both reconstructions and attributions have been disputed; see below. The sculptures concerned are: Two full reconstructions (A and B) in the Staatliche Museum, Albertinum, Dresden, with bodies purchased in 1728 from the Chigi collection, Rome, Italy. The Palagi head at the Archaeological Museum of Bologna, Italy. A further head of this type, found at Pozzuoli is conserved in the Archaeological Museum of the Campi Phlegraei. As reconstructed, the completed statues are pastiches of two Roman marbles, one for the head and the other for the body. Athena wears an unusual, cross-slung aegis decorated with the Gorgon's head. She is bare-headed, without shield, holding her helmet out in her extended right hand, and with her left grasping her spear near the top of the…