Winged Victory of Samothrace
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, or the Niké of Samothrace, is a votive monument originally discovered on the island of Samothrace in the northeastern Aegean Sea. It is a masterpiece of Greek sculpture from the Hellenistic era, dating from the beginning of the 2nd century BC. It is composed of a statue representing the goddess Nike, whose head and arms are missing, and a base in the shape of a ship's bow.
The total height of the monument is including the socle; the statue alone measures. The sculpture is one of a small number of major Hellenistic statues surviving in the original, rather than Roman copies.
Winged Victory has been exhibited at the Louvre in Paris, at the top of the main staircase, since 1884. Greece is seeking the return of the sculpture.
Discovery and restorations
In the 19th century
In 1863, Charles Champoiseau, acting chief of the Consulate of France in Adrianopolis, undertook from March 6 to May 7 the exploration of the ruins of the sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace. On April 13, 1863, he discovered part of the bust and the body of a large female statue in white marble accompanied by numerous fragments of drapery and feathers. He recognised this as the goddess Niké, Victory, traditionally represented in Greek antiquity as a winged woman. In the same place was a jumble of about fifteen large grey marble blocks whose form or function was unclear: he concluded it was a funerary monument. He decided to send the statue and fragments to the Louvre Museum, and to leave the large blocks of grey marble on site. Departing Samothrace at the beginning of May 1863, the statue arrived in Toulon at the end of August and in Paris on May 11, 1864.A first restoration was undertaken by Adrien Prévost de Longpérier, then curator of Antiquities at the Louvre, between 1864 and 1866. The main part of the body is erected on a stone base, and largely completed by fragments of drapery, including the fold of himation that flares behind the legs on the Nike. The remaining fragments – the right part of the bust and a large part of the left wing – too incomplete to be placed on the statue, are stored. Given the exceptional quality of the sculpture, Longpérier decided to present the body alone, exhibited until 1880 among the Roman statues, first in the Caryatid Room, then briefly in the Tiber Room.
Image:Tétradrachme en argent représentant Poséidon à droite.jpg|thumb|left|Tetradrachm of Demetrios Poliorcetes. Obverse: Nike before the ship; reverse: Poseidon.
Beginning in 1875, Austrian archaeologists who, under the direction of Alexander Conze, had been excavating the buildings of the Samothrace sanctuary since 1870, studied the location where Champoiseau had found the Victory. Architect Aloïs Hauser drew the grey marble blocks left on-site and apprehended that, once properly assembled, they would form the tapered bow of a warship, and that, placed on a base of slabs, they served as the basis for the statue. Tetradrachmas of Demetrios Poliorcetes struck between 301 and 292 BC, representing a Victory on the bow of a ship, wings outstretched, give a good idea of this type of monument. For his part, the specialist in ancient sculpture Otto Benndorf studied the body of the statue and the fragments kept in reserve at the Louvre and restored the statue blowing into a trumpet that she raises with her right arm, as on the coin. The two men thus managed to make a model of the Samothrace monument as a whole.
Champoiseau, informed of this research, undertook a second mission to Samothrace from August 15 to 29, 1879, for the sole purpose of sending the blocks of the base and the slabs of the Victory base to the Louvre. He abandoned on the island the largest block of the base, unsculpted. Two months later, the blocks reached the Louvre Museum, where in December an assembly test was carried out in a courtyard.
The curator of the Department of Antiquities, Félix Ravaisson-Mollien, then decided to reconstruct the monument, in accordance with the model of Austrian archaeologists. On the body of the statue, between 1880 and 1883 he restored the belt area in plaster, placed the right part of the marble bust, recreated the left part in plaster, attached the left marble wing with a metal frame, and replaced the entire right wing with a plaster model. But he did not reconstruct the head, arms or feet. The ship-shaped base is rebuilt and completed, except for the broken bow of the keel, and there is still a large void at the top aft. The statue was placed directly on the base. The entire monument was then placed from the front, on the upper landing of the Daru staircase, the main staircase of the museum.
Champoiseau returned to Samothrace a third time in 1891 to try to obtain the Victory's head, but without success. He did however bring back debris from the drapery and base, a small fragment with an inscription and fragments of coloured plaster.
In the 20th century
The presentation of the Victory was modified in 1934 as part of a general redevelopment of the Daru museum and staircase, whose steps were widened and redecorated. The monument was staged to constitute the crowning of the staircase: it was advanced on the landing to be more visible from the bottom of the steps, and was put on a modern 45 cm-high block of stone, supposed to evoke a combat bridge at the bow of the ship. This presentation remained unchanged until 2013.At the declaration of the Second World War in September 1939, the Victory statue was moved along with other artefacts to the Château de Valençay until the Liberation, and was replaced at the top of the stairs without damage in July 1945.
American excavators from New York University, under the direction of Karl Lehmann, resumed exploration of the sanctuary of the Great Gods in Samothrace in 1938. In July 1950, they associated Louvre curator Jean Charbonneaux with their work, who discovered the palm of the statue's right hand in the Victory site. Two fingers preserved at the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna since the Austrian excavations of 1875 were reattached to the palm. The palm and fingers were then deposited in the Louvre Museum, and displayed with the statue in 1954.
Two pieces of grey marble that were used to moor fishing boats on the beach below the sanctuary were retrieved and reassembled at the museum in 1952. These were studied in 1996 by Ira Mark and Marianne Hamiaux, who concluded that these pieces, jointed, constitute the block of the base abandoned by Champoiseau in 1879.
In the 21st century
An American team led by James R. McCredie digitized the entire sanctuary to allow its 3D reconstruction between 2008 and 2014. B. D. Wescoat led the resumption of the study of the Victory enclosure and the small basic fragments preserved in reserve.In Paris, the Louvre Museum restored the entire monument with two objectives: to clean all the surfaces and to improve the general presentation. The statue came down from its base to undergo scientific examination : traces of blue paint were detected on the wings and on a strip at the bottom of the mantle. The blocks of the base were disassembled one by one to be drawn and studied. The 19th-century restoration of the statue was preserved with a few details ; fragments preserved in reserve at the Louvre were added ; and the metal vice behind the left leg was removed. Castings of small joint fragments preserved in Samothrace were integrated into the base. A cast of the large ship block left in Samothrace was replaced by a metal base on a cylinder ensuring the proper balance of the statue. Once in place on the base, the colour contrast of the marbles of the two elements became obvious again. The whole was reassembled on a modern base, a little removed on the landing to facilitate the movement of visitors.
The Greek government considers the Winged Victory, like the Elgin Marbles, illegally plundered and wants it repatriated to Greece. "If the French and the Louvre have a problem, we are ready to preserve and accentuate the Victory of Samothrace, if they return it to us", Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Akis Gerondopoulos said in 2013.
Description
The statue
The statue, in white Parian marble, depicts a winged woman, the goddess of Victory, alighting on the bow of a warship.The Nike is dressed in a long tunic in a very fine fabric, with a folded flap and belted under the chest. It was attached to the shoulders by two thin straps. The lower body is partially covered by a thick mantle rolled up at the waist and untied when uncovering the entire left leg; one end slides between the legs to the ground, and the other, much shorter, flies freely in the back. The mantle is falling, and only the force of the wind holds it on her right leg. The sculptor has multiplied the effects of draperies, between places where the fabric is plated against the body by revealing its shapes, especially on the belly, and those where it accumulates in folds deeply hollowed out casting a strong shadow, as between the legs. This extreme virtuosity concerns the left side and front of the statue. On the right side, the layout of the drapery is reduced to the main lines of the clothes, in a much less elaborate work.
The goddess advances, leaning on her right leg. The two feet that were bare have not been found. The right touched the ground, the heel still slightly raised; the left foot, the leg strongly stretched back, was still carried in the air. The goddess is not walking, she is finishing her flight, her large wings still spread out backwards. The arms were also not found, but the right shoulder raised indicates that the right arm was raised to the side. With her elbow bent, the goddess made a victorious gesture of salvation with her hand: this hand with outstretched fingers held nothing. There is no clue to reconstructing the position of the left arm, probably lowered, very slightly bent; the goddess may have held a stylis on this side, a kind of mast taken as a trophy on the enemy ship, as seen on coins. The statue is designed to be seen three quarters left, from where the lines of the composition are very clear: a vertical from the neck to the right foot, and an oblique starting from the neck diagonally along the left leg. "The whole body is inscribed in a rectangular triangle, a simple but very solid geometric figure: it was necessary to support both the fulfilled shapes of the goddess, the accumulation of draperies, and the energy of movement". Most recently the Alula feather was restored to the left wing in a flared position, as it would be for a bird landing.
The art historian H. W. Janson has pointed out that unlike earlier Greek or Near Eastern sculptures, the Nike creates a deliberate relationship to the imaginary space around the goddess. The wind that has carried her and which she is fighting off, straining to keep steady – as mentioned the original mounting had her standing on a ship's prow, just having landed – is the invisible complement of the figure and the viewer is made to imagine it. At the same time, this expanded space heightens the symbolic force of the work; the wind and the sea are suggested as metaphors of struggle, destiny and divine help or grace. This kind of interplay between a statue and the space conjured up would become a common device in baroque and romantic art, about two thousand years later. It is present in Michelangelo's sculpture of David: David's gaze and pose show where he is seeing his adversary Goliath and his awareness of the moment – but it is rare in ancient art.