The Parthenon Frieze is the low-relief Pentelic marble sculpture created to adorn the upper part of the Parthenon's naos.
It was sculpted between and 437 BC,438 was the year of the dedication of the Parthenon and is usually taken as an upper limit for completion of the frieze, see I Jenkins, The Parthenon Frieze and Perikles' cavalry of 1000, p149–150, in Hurwit, 2005, for a discussion of the dating problem. most likely under the direction of Phidias. Of the 160 meters (524 ft) of the original frieze, 128 meters (420 ft) survives—some 80 percent.Jenkins, 2002, p.49 The rest is known only from the drawings attributed to French artist Jacques Carrey in 1674, thirteen years before the Venetian bombardment that ruined the temple. Along with the 64 Metopes of the Parthenon and 28 figures Pediments of the Parthenon, it forms the bulk of surviving sculpture from the building.
All of the frieze has been removed from the Parthenon.
56 blocks of the frieze are at the British Museum in London (forming the major part of the Elgin Marbles); 40 blocks are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and the remainder of fragments shared between six other institutions.80m in London and 50m in Athens according to the Greek Culture Ministry's website accessed 27.6.2010. The six other museums being: Musée du Louvre; Vatican Museums; National Museum, Copenhagen; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; University Museum, Würzburg; Glyptothek, Munich, from the British Museum website accessed 27.6.2010 Casts of the frieze may be found in the Beazley archive at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, at the Spurlock Museum in Urbana, in the Skulpturhalle at Basel and elsewhere.For example, in the Architecture Hall at the University of Washington, Seattle, in the Museum of the Center for the Acropolis Studies at Athens, at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, at Hammerwood Park near East Grinstead in Sussex, at the Nashville Parthenon, and at the University of Strasbourg (France) The part of the frieze in London has been claimed by Greece, and British and Greek authorities are discussing its future. On March 24, 2023, a relief fragment of a young man from "Block 5" of the frieze was repatriated to the Acropolis Museum from the Vatican Museums.
Construction
Plutarch's Life of Pericles, 13.4–9, informs us "the man who directed all the projects and was overseer [episkopos] for him [Pericles] was Phidias... Almost everything was under his supervision, and, as we have said, he was in charge, owing to his friendship with Perikles, of all the other artists".πάντα δὲ διεῖπε καὶ πάντων ἐπίσκοπος ἦν αὐτῷ Φειδίας, καίτοι μεγάλους ἀρχιτέκτονας ἐχόντων καὶ τεχνίτας τῶν ἔργων…πάντα δ᾽ ἦν σχεδὸν ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ, καὶ πᾶσιν, ὡς εἰρήκαμεν, ἐπεστάτει τοῖς τεχνίταις διὰ φιλίαν Περικλέους. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914 The description was not architekton,Liddell Scott Jones, ἀρχι-τέκτων, chief-artificer, master-builder, director of works the term usually given to the creative influence behind a building project, rather episkopos.LSJ, ἐπίσκοπ-ος, one who watches over, overseer, guardian But it is from this claim, the circumstantial evidence of Phidias's known work on the Athena Parthenos and his central role in the Periclean building programme that he is attributed authorship of the frieze.Ridgway, 1981, p.17, designates the artist as the "Parthenon Master" precisely to avoid the problem of attribution. She also speculates on whether Perikles might have been responsible for the overall conception of the Parthenon's sculptural program, see note 3, p.17. The frieze consists of 378 figures and 245 animals. It was 160 meters (524 ft) in length when complete, as well as 1 meter in height, and it projects 5.6 cm forward at its maximum depth. It is composed of 114 blocks of an average 1.22 meters in length, depicting two parallel files in procession. It was a particular novelty of the Parthenon that the cella carries an Ionic frieze over the hexastyle pronaos rather than Doric metopes, as would have been expected of a Doric temple. Judging by the existence of regulae and guttae below the frieze on the east wall this was an innovation introduced late in the building process and replaced the ten metopes and triglyphs that might otherwise have been placed there.Neils, 2001, p.38
The marble was quarried from Mount Pentelicus and transported 19 km to the acropolis of Athens. A persistent question has been whether it was carved in situ.Neils, 2001, p.77, also note 8 for the historiography of the problem. Just below the moulding and above the tenia there is a channel 17 mm high that would have served to give access to the sculptor's chisel when finishing the heads or feet on the relief; this scamillus or guide strip is the best evidence there is that the blocks were carved on the wall. Additionally, on practical grounds it is easier to move a sculptor than a sculpture, and to use a crowbar to put them into place, potentially, could have chipped the edges.Neils, 2001, p.77 No information is recoverable on the workshop, but estimates range from three to 80 sculptors on the basis of style. However, American archeologist Jenifer Neils suggests nine, on the grounds that this would be the least number necessary to produce the work in the time given.Neils, 2001, p.87 It was finished with metal detailing and painted. No colour, however, survives, but perhaps the background was blue, judging by comparison with grave stelae and the paint remnants on the frieze of the Hephaisteion.Neils, 2001, p.88 "It is generally assumed that the background of the frieze was painted blue, on analogy with the blue background of other fifth-century relief sculptures, namely, grave stelae. Perhaps the closest comparison is with the Hephaisteion frieze, which according to several early travellers to Greece preserved traces of a blue background in addition to other paint…The Elusinian limestone used for the background of the Erechtheion frieze is also dark blue in colour. Thus, we can safely assume that at least the background of the Parthenon frieze was more or less as the nineteenth-century Dutch painter Alma-Tadema depicted it." Possibly figures held objects that were also rendered in paint such as Poseidon's trident and the laurel in Apollo's hand.Neils, 2001, p.90 The many drill holes found in Hera's and Apollo's heads indicate that a gilded bronze wreath would probably have crowned the deities.Neils, 2001, p.91
The system of numbering the frieze blocks dates back to Adolf Michaelis's 1871 work Der Parthenon, and since then Ian Jenkins has revised this scheme in the light of recent discoveries.Jenkins, 1994, pp.50–1Particularly the manuscript of Francis Vernon of 1675, describing the frieze prior to the Venetian bombardment which shed new light on the "Carrey drawings" of 1674, see Bowie, Thimme, 1971, and B. D. Meritt, The Epigraphic notes of Francis Vernon, in Commemorative Studies in Honor of Theodore Leslie Shear (Hesperia Suppl. 8, Princeton 1949) The convention, here preserved, is that blocks are numbered in Roman and figures in Arabic numerals, the figures are numbered left to right against the direction of the procession on the north and west and with it on the south.
Description
The narrative of the frieze begins at the southwest corner where the procession appears to divide into two separate files. The first third of the west frieze is not part of the procession, but instead, seems to be the preparatory stages for the participants. The first figure here is a marshal dressing, W30, followed by several men preparing the horses W28–23 until figure W22 who, it has been suggested,Robertson, Frantz, 1975, notes to plate 9. may be engaged in the dokimasia, the tryout or enrollment of the knights.however Bugh, 1988 however, has argued that the scene is unrelated to the military and specific to the religious procession, see Neils, 2001, p.128 W24 is an ambiguous figure who might be either the protesting owner of a rejected horse or a keryx (herald) whose hand held part of an otherwise lost salpinx (trumpet), but either way this point marks the beginning of the procession proper.Neils, 2001, p.132
The following ranks W21–1 along with N75–136 and S1–61 are all of horsemen and constitute 46% of the whole frieze. They are divided into two lines of ten ranks – the same number as that of the Attic tribes.The Athenian cavalry was organised by tribe of phylai and commanded by ten officers known as phlyarchs All figures are beardless youths with the exception of two, W8 and W15, who along with S2–7 wear Thracian dress of fur cap, a patterned cloak, and high boots; these have been identified by Martin Robertson as hipparchs.Robertson, Frantz, 1975, p.46 Next are the four-horse chariots, each with charioteer and armed passenger, there are ten on the south frieze and eleven on the north. Since these passengers are sometimes depicted as dismounting they may be taken to represent the apobatai, participants in the ceremonial race found in Attica and Boeotia.Kyle, 1993, see Neils, 2001, p.138
By N42 and S89 the equestrian parade is at an end, and the following 16 figures on the north and 18 on the south are taken to be the elders of Athens judging by their braided hair, an attribute of distinguished age in Classical art. Four of these figures raise their right hand in a clenched fist gesture suggestive of a pose associated with the thallophoroi (olive branch bearers) who were older men chosen in competition for their good looks alone. No drill holes, however, exist for any branch to be inserted in their hands. Next in line (S107–114, N20–28) are the musicians: four kithara (a variant of the lyre) and four aulos (flute) players. N16–19 and S115–118 (conjectured) perhaps, as hydriaphoroi, the water-vessel carriers, here men, rather than metic girls mentioned in the literature on the Panathenaia. N13–15, S119–121 are the skaphephoroi, the tray bearers of the honeycombs and cakes used to entice the sacrificial animals to the altar. N1–12, S122–149 are the four cows and four sheep on the north and ten cows on the south meant for sacrifice on the acropolis, presumably an abbreviated form of the hecatomb usually offered on this occasion – there is an a-b-a rhythm of placid and restive cows.Neils, 2001, p.154
As the files converge on the east frieze we encounter the first women celebrants E2–27, E50–51, E53–63. The priestesses carry the sacrificial instruments and paraphernalia including the phiale (phial or jug), oinochoai (wine jars), thymiaterion (incense burner), and in the case of E50–51, evidently they have just handed the marshal E49 a kanoun, making the girl the kanephoros.Roccos, 1999, pp.641–66. The next groups E18–23, E43–46, are problematic. Six on the left and four on the right, if one does not count two other figures who may or may not be marshals, then this group might be taken to be the ten eponymous heroes who gave their names to the ten tribes. Their proximity to the deities indicates their importance, but selecting differently, then nine of them may be the archons of the polis or athlothetai officials who managed the procession; there is insufficient iconographic evidence to determine which interpretation is correct.