Aeginetan Marbles
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ej-i-ne'tan, a famous collection of marble statuary from the Greek island of Aegina. This island lies in the Aegean Sea, twenty miles off shore from the port of Athens. It is about nine miles in length and has a present population of about 7,000. At one time Aegina was the most important and the wealthiest commercial city of Greece. The famous naval victory over the Persians at Salamis was won largely through the prowess of the thirty ships of Aegina, though that did not protect the city from the growing power and jealousy of Athens. The temples and other public buildings of Aegina were on a scale of magnificence, still the admiration of the excavator and archaeologist. The ruins of seventeen Christian churches show also that the island was the seat of a flourishing civilization early in the Christian era. Many statues and other prizes of classical art have been dug out of the ruins of the old city and carried away. A collection known as the Aeginetan Marbles is preserved in the royal art museum of Munich. A large room known as the Aeginetan Hall is given to the display. Many of the best specimens are from a noble temple of Zeus, or, as some think, of Athena, considered second only to the Parthenon in symmetry and beauty of proportion. The Danish sculptor Thorwaldsen spent no little time in studying these statues. He used plaster of Paris to replace fragments that had been broken off and lost. There are seventeen large groups representing events in the siege of Troy and in the lives of Hercules, Athena, Achilles, Ajax, etc. This famous statuary fairly rivals the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon. The Aeginetan Marbles, however, are somewhat older, dating, it is believed, from about 475 B. C. See Elgin Marbles; Munich ; Sculpture
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 the temple was still called one "of Zeus, or, as some think, of Athena"; excavation of the site by Adolf Furtw urturned up dedications naming the goddess Aphaia, and it has been known as the Temple of Aphaia ever since. Thorvaldsen's plaster arms, legs and noses, admired here as careful restoration, were stripped off the figures at Munich's Glyptothek in the 1960s under Dieter Ohly, so the pediments are now shown as broken ancient stone; Ohly's work also reassembled a second, earlier east pediment. The date has been pushed back a little, to roughly 505 their480 BC rather than 475, which puts the sculptures on the cusp between the Archaic and Classical styles. Later study of surviving pigment traces has also shown the warriors were once painted in strong reds, blues and greens, not the white marble visitors see.
Written for this edition, 2026.