Athena, known as the Pallas of Velletri
Unknown, after a Greek bronze original of c. 430 BC · Roman, 1st century AD
Athena towers over the room in a heavy belted peplos, her left arm raised to grasp a spear that is no longer there and her right extended, probably once holding a libation bowl or a small figure of Victory. Over her chest lies the aegis, the goatskin cuirass fringed with snakes and centred on the head of the Gorgon, the trophy that turns enemies to stone. A high Attic helmet pushed back from her forehead frames a broad, unsmiling face. This is Athena as city protector rather than battlefield fighter, calm, frontal and imperturbable.
The statue is Roman, made in the first century AD from Thasian marble, but it copies a Greek bronze of about 430 BC, the generation of the Parthenon sculptures. The copyist had to solve problems bronze never posed: the long vertical folds of the woollen peplos double as a column of support, and the weight of the raised arm is carried by careful drilling and joining rather than by tensile metal. Look at the contrast between the deep, almost architectural channels of the skirt and the finer crinkled cloth over the chest. The lighter, brighter passages are Carrara marble restorations added after the statue's discovery.
She was unearthed in 1797 on the site of a Roman villa at Velletri in the Alban Hills, south of Rome, and was bought for France in 1803 during the Napoleonic campaign of acquisitions that also filled the Louvre with the Borghese antiquities. A long conservation campaign in recent years removed the grime of two centuries and stabilised the old joins, restoring the pale grey translucency of the Thasian stone and making the Gorgon's face legible again.
Did You Know? At just over three metres she is the tallest ancient statue in the Louvre's Greek galleries, and a recent cleaning revealed that the helmet was once fitted with separately carved crest supports.
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