page_title: Ancient Greek sculpture
section_title: Cult images
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Greek sculpture / Cult images
caption_attribution_description: English: A recreation in modern materials of the lost colossal statue by Pheidias, Athena Parthenos by Alan LeQuire (1990) is housed in a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park. She is the largest indoor sculpture in the western world.
context_page_description: The sculpture of ancient Greece is the main surviving type of fine ancient Greek art as, with the exception of painted ancient Greek pottery, almost no ancient Greek painting survives. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages in monumental sculpture in bronze and stone: the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic. At all periods there were great numbers of Greek terracotta figurines and small sculptures in metal and other materials.
  The Greeks decided very early on that the human form was the most important subject for artistic endeavour. Seeing their gods as having human form, there was little distinction between the sacred and the secular in art—the human body was both secular and sacred. A male nude of Apollo or Heracles had only slight differences in treatment to one of that year's Olympic boxing champion. The statue, originally single but by the Hellenistic period often in groups was the dominant form, though reliefs, often so "high" that they were almost free-standing, were also important.
context_section_description: All ancient Greek temples and Roman temples normally contained a cult image in the cella.  Access to the cella varied, but apart from the priests, at the least some of the general worshippers could access the cella some of the time, though sacrifices to the deity were normally made on altars outside in the temple precinct (tenemos in Greek).  Some cult images were easy to see, and were what we would call major tourist attractions.  The image normally took the form of a statue of the deity, originally less than life-size, then typically roughly life-size, but in some cases many times life-size, in marble or bronze, or in the specially prestigious form of a Chryselephantine statue using ivory plaques for the visible parts of the body and gold for the clothes, around a wooden framework.  The most famous Greek cult images were of this type, including the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, and Phidias's Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon in Athens, both colossal statues now completely lost. Fragments of two chryselephantine statues from Delphi have been excavated.  Cult images generally held or wore identifying attributes, which is one way of distinguishing them from the many other statues of deities in temples and other locations.
  The acrolith was another composite form, this time a cost-saving one with a wooden body.  A xoanon was a primitive and symbolic wooden image, perhaps comparable to the Hindu lingam; many of these were retained and revered for their antiquity.  Many of the Greek statues well known from Roman marble copies were originally temple cult images, which in some cases, such as the Apollo Barberini, can be credibly identified.  A very few actual originals survive, for example the bronze Piraeus Athena (2.35 metres high, including a helmet).
  In Greek and Roman mythology, a "palladium" was an image of great antiquity on which the safety of a city was said to depend, especially the wooden one that Odysseus and Diomedes stole from the citadel of Troy and which was later taken to Rome by Aeneas. (The Roman story was related in Virgil's Aeneid and other works.)
caption: Reproduction of the Athena Parthenos statue at the original size in the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee.
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