When you visit the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (make it your first stop in that fine city!) you will likely encounter this impressive bronze monument – hard to miss since it is a nearly life-sized race-horse dating to the second century B.C. Perched precariously on its withers is a young jockey exhorting his powerful
Well I woke up thinking of bronzes today but this marvelous head wormed its way into my imagination. The trick is, it’s not bronze at all, but rather diabolically hard, dark stone. Black basalt (basanite), a fine-grained volcanic stone, was quarried in Egypt from the ‘Mons basanites’ deep in the Eastern desert. While it was
All hail, Hera, the queen of the Olympian gods, long-suffering (and occasionally vengeful) wife of Zeus, revered throughout the Greek world. Found in Olympia by the German excavation team in the late 19th century at the Temple of Hera there, this is a colossal (52 cm tall – double life sized) early Archaic head, dating
Royal sibling rivalry? Why, yes please, just the 3rd century A.D. edition of ‘the heir and the spare’… This delectable painted roundel (tempera on a panel) now in Berlin shows the Severan Royal family in happier days around 200 A.D. Emperor Septimius Severus and Empress Julia Domna are shown in the background, and the two