Lemnian Athena

The Lemnian Athena, or Athena Lemnia, was a classical Greek statue of the goddess Athena. According to Pausanias (1.28.2), the original bronze was created by Phidias circa 450-440 BCE, for Athenians living on Lemnos to dedicate on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.

It is unclear whether any copies remain. In 1891 Adolf Furtwängler reconstructed two virtually identical, Roman marble statues which he claimed as copies of the original, and identified two Roman marble copies of the head alone. These completed statues were recreated by joining a poorly preserved marble head (Dresden) and a plaster cast of a similar Roman marble head, from the collection of Pelagio Palagi (Bologna), to a pair of identical bodies in Dresden. Both reconstructions and attributions have been disputed; see below.

The sculptures concerned are:

As reconstructed, the completed statues are pastiches of two Roman marbles, one for the head and the other for the body. Athena wears an unusual, cross-slung aegis decorated with the Gorgon's head. She is bare-headed, without shield, holding her helmet out in her extended right hand, and with her left grasping her spear near the top of the shaft.

Furtwängler's identification of the original Athena Lemnia with the Dresden statues and Palagi head was based upon study of an engraved gem and by interpretation of the following passages from Pausanias, Lucian, and Himerios:

Furtwängler's logic has been disputed. "Hartswick has shown that the Palagi head in Bologna cannot have come from Dresden statue B, that the gems Furtwängler employed could be post-antique, and that the sources are impossibly vague." (Stewart) Some of Hartwick's own conclusions have been disputed in turn, i.e., that the head of Dresden A is alien and the entire Palagi type is Hadrianic. Stewart remarks, "So while the type remains intact and looks Phidian, Furtwängler's further hypotheses concerning its identity and date (451-448) remain unproven."

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