Cherchell-Ostia Athena

Roman art

The figure, of which only the body is original, wears a peplos with wide lateral folds reaching down to the hips and an aegis made from the skin of Amalthea, the goat who had protected and fed Zeus. These details identify the statue as Athena, goddess of wisdom, of the arts and of war. The goddess holds up a spear in her right hand, while her left hand rests on her hip, as in most known replicas of the type, named Cherchell-Ostia after the place of origin of the two best replicas. Having set aside the hypothesis of recognising its prototype in the statue from the temple of Hephaestus, near the Agora in Athens, this type is believed to be a work of the late Classical period or perhaps an eclectic creation of the late Hellenistic period. The Borghese statue, which was part of Cardinal D’Este’s collection in the sixteenth century, during the seventeenth century was placed by the oval fountain in the first enclosure of Villa Pinciana, not far from where it was unearthed in 1827 and later restored by Antonio D’Este and placed in Room VII of Galleria Borghese.

Object details

Commentary

The sculpture has been recognised among the sixteenth-century engravings by Giovan Battista De Cavalieri, located according to the caption in Cardinal d’Este’s Horti (De Cavalieri n.d., table 57; Moreno, Viacava 2003, p. 222). In the seventeenth century, however, the statue was exhibited in the first enclosure of Villa Pinciana, where its presence was recorded by Iacomo Manilli and, later, by Domenico Montelatici, who describes it as being near the oval fountain, a short distance from the spot where, according to a note by Evasio Gozzani, the sculpture was unearthed in 1827 and at the same time entrusted to Antonio D’Este for restoration in view of the new collection in the Casino, impoverished by the massive sale of works to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The statue, of which only the body is original, stands on her right leg, with the left bent and opening onto the side; she wears a peplos fastened by fibulae on the shoulders, with a wide fold falling over the hips. The aegis made from the skin of Amalthea, the goat that protected and fed Zeus is placed transversally over the peplos and this allows us to identify the figure as Athena, goddess of wisdom, of the arts and of war. The goddess holds up a spear in her right hand, while her left hand rests on her hip, as in most known replicas of the type, named Cherchell-Ostia after the place of origin of two of the best replicas (Altripp 2010, pp. 93–107), with the exception of the one from Chercell (ancient Caesarea Mauretaniae), in which she holds a shield. The head, which like the limbs and the plinth are nineteenth-century integrations, is a face of Athena with a Corinthian helmet; unknown, however, are the features of the head, that find no correspondence in any of the other eight known examples. From the number of preserved replicas, a famous late-Classical or perhaps an eclectic creation of the late Hellenistic prototype period can be posited, in which the severe attire can be read as an allusion to fifth-century BCE Pheidian creations in Athens (Grassinger 2012). The identification proposed by E. Reisch for the Cherchell statue with the Athena Hephaisteia, the cult statue made around 430 BCE by Alkamenes for the temple of Hephaestus at the of Ceramicus Agora in Athens, seen by Pausanias together with the Hephaestus (I,14,6), seems unlikely; according to the accounting records, in fact, this statue was much larger than life-size, while the Cherchell type has been handed down in replicas consistently smaller than life-size (Altripp 2001; Altripp 2010). Ina Altripp suggests that most of the known replicas were made in the second century CE; this certainly applies to the Borghese piece, whose stylistic details, such as the transparency of the peplos on the left leg and the subtle chiaroscuro created by the lateral folds of the peplos, allow for Antonine age dating.

Jessica Clementi