Hi Lauren.

Here are my editorial comments on your paper on the Nike of Samothrace. I am certainly no expert on Hellenistic art, so I have been humble and gullible, The accuracy of your assertions is mostly left unchallenged, so your reputation and credibility is entirely in your hands.

I assume you will want pictures of the Nike to appear in the paper. These should probably be sent to Charles Umiker.

April 23, 2001

Hellenistic Art

Final Paper

By a remarkable stroke of fortune, the Nike of Samothrace (Louvre #MA2639, Fig. 1), today the most widely known work of Hellenistic sculpture, survives in its original form and was unearthed from its original setting. The marble statue represents an over life-sized winged victory alighting on a ship’s prow, which is present in a scaled-down version as the Nike’s base. This work may have originally been part of a monumental fountain installation. In 1863, M. Champoiseau found the statue, broken into several pieces, lying in a rectangular basin located on a windy ridge that overlooked the Samothracian Sanctuary of the Great Gods and, in the distance, the rough waters of the Aegean Sea. In the Hellenistic period, when the Nike was created, Samothrace was known for both its mystery cult and its position on an important but stormy sea lane.

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Offsetting the lucky circumstances of the Nike’s survival and discovery, however, is the almost total lack of literary or epigraphical reference to the sculpture. In the absence of such crucial evidence, scholars have debated the purpose of the Nike for more than a century, wondering who made her, precisely when, and why. Without definite answers to these questions, scholars have largely left their treatment of the work’s meaning in vague terms, commenting on the statue’s beauty but hesitating to speculate about what deeper reaction it might have been intended to evoke in the ancient Greek spectator. I will attempt here to make such an interpretive study of the Nike of Samothrace. By looking at the sculpture through the lenses of formal analysis, historical patronage of the Samothracian cult, and the innovative victory dedications in the Hellenistic age I propose to approximate a Hellenistic viewer’s understanding and appreciation of the Nike. I believe that such analysis inevitably leads to the conclusion that the Nike of Samothrace is a Pergamene dedication memorializing the Pergamene-engineered Roman capture in 166 BC of King Perseus, last of the Macedonians, at the island of Samothrace itself. The sculpture therefore belongs to the Attalid tradition of generosity, intellectualism, and claim to the Classical Athenian role as savior of Greek civilization.

The Figure

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Her drapery serves to dramatically emphasize both her dynamic forward movement against the wind and her full, robust form-her powerful thighs and the active, contracted muscles of her torso. The drapery clings with thin, long, and uneven ripples to her breasts, abdomen, right leg, and left thigh, its near transparency revealing these parts of the body almost as if they were nude. Excess fabric forms heavy yet dynamically irregular shapes and bunches. A long, uneven arc of cloth between her legs accentuates their motion and implies the counter-force of the wind against her body. The sculptor draws attention to this downward arc with a swath of drapery that flies forward from the left hip and collides in a V-shape with the longer swath at the Nike’s pelvis. At the same time, in the back of the statue fabric soars out behind the figure in rigid crests. The effect of this drapery is choppy and uneven, the wind whipping the cloth as it does sea below into irregular peaks and troughs.

The effect of this drapery is choppy and uneven” does not seem to have agreement between the noun and the adjectives. “The effect is to make the figure appear...”?

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The Nike’s wings are intensely naturalistic, and also contribute to the uneven, chaotic, and exuberantly active tone of the statue. In a motion that echoes the V-shape of the drapery between her legs, the goddess pushes her wings back as far as they seem capable of going, and extends them to their full length (Fig. 2). In doing so, she exactly mimics the behavior of a bird about to land. Indeed, her wings (Fig. 3) seem an enlarged copy of real bird wings (Fig. 4), from their curved crests to the joint mid way through, to their outspread, textured feathers. However, the feathers lack the regular, fan-like arrangement found in real birds. Instead, they are arrayed at odd and overlapping angles to one another, much like the folds of the drapery. Thus, though naturalistic, the wings betray the sculptor’s interest in creating irregular patterns to suggest straining, immediate action. The wings are in use in a real-life situation, thrown out against the real wind that sweeps over the Samothracian hills, to affect an imminent landing. This combination of naturalism and exaggerated irregularity in the statue gives it a breathtaking sense of urgency and actuality: this Nike, with her very corporeal body and realistic, non-ideal wings may be an unearthly being, but she is made of the stuff of this world, and the viewer can relate to her here and now.

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Without the Nike’s head and arms it is difficult to reconstruct her action more precisely. However, the recent discovery of her hands provides some helpful clues. A right hand (Fig. 5), found in 1950, has been definitively identified as belonging to the Nike; the attribution of a left (Fig. 6; discovered ca. 1966) is less certain due to the hand’s slightly smaller scale. Based on what remains of her right shoulder, it is evident that the Nike had that arm raised. Scholars once believed that the goddess held a trumpet in her right hand while the left held a spear; however, the rediscovered hands rule out this reconstruction. Though what may be a drill hole in the right thumb suggests that she carried some sort of metal attachment between thumb and index, the complete carving of the palm and outward splay of the fingers proves that she could not have held a large attribute in her right hand. If, then, this hand were simply raised against the sky in some sort of gesture, the artist would likely have carved it to be larger than scale (and therefore larger than the left hand) so as to stand out in the composition and not appear too small. This use of varying scale to take into account the viewer’s position with relation to the statue has long been a common technique. If the sculptor of the Nike used this technique, then the discovered, smaller left hand would indeed belong to the goddess and would prove that she held nothing large in either hand, since the left hand fragment also has a fully carved palm. The attitude of the left arm is less certain, since less of the shoulder remains, but it was probably not held aloft.

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The Ship Base

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Colossal in her size, turbulent in her mien, and perhaps dramatic in her gesture, the Nike of Samothrace alights on the prow of a warship. This prow serves as the base of the statue (Fig. 1). Carved from a blue-grey Rhodian marble, the six-and-a-half foot tall ship base was found in many fragments and is now mostly plastered together. It retains some traces of paint, but these are unintelligible. The basic form of the ship is roughly triangular, with the apex pointing forward. Slightly less than midway up the ship and toward the rear, an oar box is visible and lined with double rows of oar slots. A battering ram extends out and upward off the very front of the prow. The Nike now stands on a block atop the base; however, this is a museum addition. Marks on the top of the Rhodian marble prow suggest that her feet originally rested directly upon the surface of the ship. With its narrow body and skyward-pointing ram, the ship-base emphasizes the composition’s sense of forward motion and aerial uplift while drawing the viewer’s gaze to the Nike.

Because of its poor state of conservation, and because the base represents only the prow of the ship, it is probably fruitless to try to make an exact identification of the type of ship represented. Scholars have tried to identify the vessel in hopes that its exact identity will provide insight into ancient Greek naval history and/or reveal the provenance and date of the sculpture based on our knowledge of where and when certain kinds of ships were used. Unfortunately, attempts to identify the vessel have either been based upon the very controversial date and origin of the sculpture, or have produced very general results. For example, B. Ridgway reminds scholars that the most accepted identification of the ship as a trihemiolia, brings them “no closer to its ethnic identity, since the type was widely used by all Hellenistic, and even Roman, navies.” Despite the inconclusive nature of these results, studies of the ship’s construction have yielded some important information. A. Sleeswyk reconstructs the scale of the ship based on the distance between oarports, and the lengths of oars and amount of room for rowers that this distance implies, concluding that the statue base is about 1/5 life size. To an ancient viewer, familiar with the general scale of naval vessels, this size discrepancy would have been obvious, and would have suggested that, though already colossal, the statue of the Nike actually represents a forty-foot tall being. Whether or not the viewer ultimately accepts the ship as an attribute that need not have been shown to scale, or as a sign of the Nike’s truly awesome “actual” size, the scale discrepancy adds to one’s sense of the goddess’ grandeur, and hence to the dramatic impression she makes. Furthermore, Sleeswyk demonstrates that the sculpted prow is too narrow for a real ship, and is therefore tailored toward an exaggerated sense of forward motion.

Installation and Setting

The naturalism and drama of the Nike and her ship base were likely intensified even further by their installation and its setting. The ship base was installed atop six tiles of physically rippled marble (Fig. 1), some of which show evidence that bronze ornaments-perhaps representing sea life and landscape elements-were once attached to them.^^^Document Error^^^ Lehmann and Lehmann, 184; and Ridgway, 154.^^^Document Error^^^ The viewer was thus expected to experience the Nike as part of a realistic seascape diorama. The effect may have been significantly enhanced if the ensemble was indeed part of a fountain (Fig. 7), as the evidence implies. K. Lehmann, the site’s primary excavator 1938-1960, describes the findspot of the Nike as a pair of basins, Hellenistic in origin-an upper, shallow one in which the statue seems to have originally been located, and the lower, deeper basin in which she was found. Pipelines and channels from antiquity remain today, running to and from the basins. This evidence is strongly suggestive of a setting of running water. However, a full analysis of the evidence makes this conclusion less obvious. An “overflow” pipe may have actually been intended to provide water to the theater below the statue, and the upper pipeline may have originally attached to this overflow pipe rather than emptying into the statue-basin. What is more, these pipes may postdate the Nike and thus reveal nothing of the sculptor’s original intention. Finally, the basins of the supposed fountain may have been too poorly waterproofed to function in this context. This evidence seems to refute the idea of a fountain; yet if there was no fountain, why are there basins at all? Lehmann never finished his report on the excavation of the Nike “fountain,” but a complete report is now under preparation by I. Mark; perhaps it will resolve these questions.

Until the archeological evidence becomes more conclusive, however, one can only analyze the advantages and disadvantages of a fountain.

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In favor of such an installation are its usefulness to the local religious cults and the suggestive, rather than explicit, nature of the “wavy” marble tiling. P. and K. Lehmann believe that water from the putative fountain was vital to the functioning of the religious cult at Samothrace, since the stream that was the usual source of water for libations was dry most of the year. They note that there is no evidence for any other fountain of any type existing on the island, and that it would be unusual for there to be a total absence of a monumental fountain, since these were ubiquitous in Greek sanctuaries.

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**** Certainly ripples evoke water, but they are a very simplified sign for it, and could evoke other contexts as well, such as sand. The bronze sea ornaments, if they truly existed, would have clarified that the ripples signified water, but then the water would seem far too calm for the scene of turbulence and rough waters that the sculpture evokes. Indeed, the little ripples on the marble’s surface are so gentle and unobtrusive as to be easy to miss altogether. They do not even int ****** what happened here? ******dCd^^^Document Error>> and make the base out of Rhodian marble. He dedicated it to Samothrace in commemoration of his naval victories over the Selucid King Antiochus III the Great in c. 190 BC. This victory was a step toward freeing the Greek people from the dominion of the descendants of the Diadochoi and placing them under Roman law.

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Secondly, due to the conclusive pottery finds and the style, the date must be Hellenistic.

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The iconoclastically irregular and non-formulaic style further indicates a preference for dedicators who appreciated artistic innovation. Finally, the site-specific nature of the Nike, with her carefully planned associations with local geography and religion, presupposes that this monument commemorates something intimately connected with the island of Samothrace.

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site-specificity needs more development -- I am unable to see this connection in a vacuum -- too much reliance on prior knowledge

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The 306 BC argument, first advanced by Benndorf, also provides too early of a date for the style of the Nike and fails for other reasons. The first of these is that the thesis is based largely on coins of about 295 BC, minted by Demetrius Poliorcetes following his great victory over Ptolemy’s fleet at Salamis in 306 BC. The motif on these coins (Fig. 18), a winged Nike blowing a trumpet atop a ship with a broken prow, seems, at first glance, to match the Nike of Samothrace. However, upon closer reflection, whether one assumes that these coins copy the Nike of Samothrace or that they are thematically related to it, the connection fails. From the Nike’s hands, it is clear that she did not hold a trumpet as does the coin Nike; also, the wings of this Nike are dramatically different from those of the sculpture: those on the coin are more stylized and less bird-like. Finally, because of the broken prow on the coin, this ship must be a destroyed enemy vessel being claimed by the victor. The ship of the Nike of Samothrace cannot be a destroyed enemy ship because it was represented as riding even on the water; towed enemy ships were always partly sunken and waterlogged. The style of the prow also precludes its interpretation as booty, since it is seen as elegant and swift, not broken down and defeated. Thus, the coin cannot have a connection with the Nike of Samothrace because it is different in conception and detail from the statue. In the coin, the Nike’s purpose is to declare defeat; in the statue, it is to declare victory.

The most widely accepted interpretation of the Nike of Samothrace is that it was a commission of the Rhodian Eudamos in c. 190 BC. According to this interpretation, the general dedicated the sculpture at Samothrace because of its cult for sailors, and commissioned “one of the prominent artists of his time,” Pythokritos of Rhodes to create it, using marble from his home island to represent his own ship. Pythokritos of Rhodes seems as likely a sculptor for the Nike as Hieronymos, the former’s claim to the work being based upon stylistic comparison with a ship’s prow relief from Lindos. Of course, this comparison applies only to the general shape of the ship, which probably allowed for little creative license to begin with.

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