Parthenon. East frieze. Block 8 (VIII). Fragments

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Provision of image

Inventory number

Ακρ. 1189

Artist

Pheidias' workshop

Category

Architectural sculpture

Period

Classical Period

Date

442-438 BC

Dimensions

Fragment of the first girl's head: 0.125 x 0.125 x 0.03 m
Fragment of the second girl's head: 0.105 x 0.12 x 0.04 m
Fragment of the fourth girl's head: 0.13 x 0.135 m
Left side of the block with the fifth girl's head: 0.25 x 0.18 x 0.17 m

Material

Marble from Penteli

Location

Parthenon Gallery

Description
Bibliography

Head fragments that belong to four girls and fit into the plaster cast of the original Block VIII kept today in the British Museum in London. The block depicts part of the women’s procession which stretches on the previous Block VII (Ακρ. 1258) and the next Block IX (Ακρ. 2903). Here five girls walk in single file to the left. They are wearing a chiton and over it a himation or peplos. They hold ceremonial vessels for the sacrifice and libations to be performed on the Great Altar outside of the Temple of Athena Polias. The first girl carries an incense burner (thymiaterion), the girls that follow oinochoai, whereas the last ones mesomphalos phiale.

The frieze on the east side of the Parthenon shows the arrival on the Acropolis of the procession formed by the people of Athens during the festival of the Panathenaia in honour of the protectress of the city, Athena. The procession’s destination was the temple of Athena Polias. Its purpose was the transportation of the Panathenaic peplos destined to adorn the age-old xoanon of the goddess and the offer of a grand sacrifice of animals at the Great Altar outside of the temple.

The converging groups of women from both sides of the east frieze hold ritual vessels and are received by supervisors. The central scene, right above the temple's entrance, depicts the giving of the Panathenaic peplos and takes place in the presence of the Olympian gods who are rendered at a larger scale than the mortals. The gods are flanked with ten male figures, possibly the Eponymous Heroes of Attica, the mythical progenitors of the Athenian tribes.

The east frieze is relatively well preserved as the explosion of the Parthenon by the Venetians under the command of the general Francesco Morosini, in 1687, did not cause many damages on this side of the temple. The drawings attributed to the painter Jacques Carrey, who visited the Acropolis in 1674, just thirteen years before the bombardment by Morosini, help our understanding of a few missing parts of this side of the frieze.

The total length of the east frieze is 21.18 m. It is formed of eight blocks, but sometimes scholarly work refers to nine blocks as one of the slabs was initially treated as being made by two separate segments (Blocks VII and VIII). Today the so-called Block VII is in the Louvre Museum in Paris whereas the rest of them are divided between the Acropolis Museum and the British Museum in London, where they ended up after they were removed by Thomas Bruce, the lord of Elgin, in 1801-1804 when Greece was still under Ottoman occupation. In order to facilitate their transportation, Elgin's workmen, cut off with saws or crowbars only the external faces of the blocks that bore the relief decoration. The Acropolis Museum exhibition includes plaster casts of the blocks’ faces on which some of the original fragments that fell off the monument, and thus escaped the looting, have been adjusted.

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