The Lioness and Bull Pediment of the Hekatompedon
About 570 to 560 BC
In the Archaic Gallery, painted limestone figures from the gables of the earliest great temple on the Acropolis are set up on low walls at eye level. The temple is called the Hekatompedon, the hundred-footer, and stood where the Parthenon now stands, a century before it. In the centre of one pediment a lioness tears into a bull, its neck already broken, her claws deep in its flank. In the corners, where the roof slopes down to nothing, a three-bodied monster with wings and snake tails, nicknamed Bluebeard for his still bright blue paint, curls into the angle, and Herakles wrestles a sea god. The pieces were reassembled from hundreds of fragments buried after the Persian sack.
The material is soft local limestone, easy to carve and made to be painted, and the paint is what makes these pediments so startling. Blues, reds, greens and black survive on the scales, the beards, the wings and the blood, so you can see the temple as the Athenians saw it, brightly coloured against the sky. Look at the bull's eye and the lioness's ribs, both carved with a simple, powerful sense of pattern rather than realism. The sculptors were still working out how to fill the awkward triangle of a pediment, and their answer, animals in the middle and curling monsters in the corners, was followed for generations.
The fragments were found in the 1880s in the Acropolis fill, and how they fitted together and which temple they belonged to has been debated ever since. Most scholars now agree the lion and bull groups belong to a temple built around 570 BC, perhaps connected with the founding of the Panathenaic festival. The museum shows the pieces as a landscape of sculpture rather than a reconstructed gable, so walk among them slowly and let the colour do the work.
Did You Know? The three-bodied monster in the corner is nicknamed Bluebeard because his painted beards are still blue after twenty-six centuries.
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