Head of the Athena Lemnia

myminifactory

This bust originates from a larger figurative piece titled The Athena Lemnia (also available for download on Scan the World). The Athena Lemnia was a classical Greek statue of the goddess Athena, created by Phidias around 450-440 BCE for Athenians living on Lemnos to dedicate at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. According to Pausanias, it is unclear whether any copies remain today. In 1891, Adolf Furtwangler reconstructed two virtually identical Roman marble statues that he claimed were 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 from Dresden with a plaster cast of a similar Roman marble head from the collection of Pelagio Palagi in Bologna to a pair of identical bodies in Dresden.