page_title: Pediments of the Parthenon
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Pediments of the Parthenon / History
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Dessin du Parthénon par Cyriaque d'Ancône. XVe siècle
context_page_description: The pediments of the Parthenon are the two sets of statues in Pentelic marble originally located on the east and west facades of the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens. They were likely made by several artists, including Agoracritos. The master builder was likely Phidias.
  Thanks to Pausanias, a Greek geographer, the themes of these pediments are known: to the east, the birth of Athena, and to the west the quarrel between her and Poseidon to become the tutelary deity of Athens.
  The pediments were very damaged by time and military conflicts. Considered the archetype of classical sculpture, or even the embodiment of ideal Beauty, several of the statues were removed from the building by Lord Elgin's agents in the early nineteenth century and transported to the British Museum in London. Some statues and many fragments are kept at the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
context_section_description: Block 19 of the eastern pediment's horizontal cornice was damaged and repaired in Roman times, but there is no evidence of restoration work on a statue. At the time of the transformation of the Parthenon into a church, somewhere in the sixth or the seventh century, the statues of the center of the eastern pediment were deposited to make way for the apse.
  In the first half of the fifteenth century, Cyriac d'Ancona during one of his visits to Athens drew one of the pediments, probably that of the west. He represents only a carriage, probably that of Athena: that of Poseidon would have already disappeared, without his fate being known. In 1674, an artist in the service of the Marquis de Nointel (French ambassador to the Sublime Porte), perhaps Jacques Carrey,  depicted the west pediment which lacks the chariot of the god of the seas and a few heads, including that of Athena. The pediment was already very damaged.
  During the siege of Athens, by the Venetians commanded by Francesco Morosini, on September 26, 1687 the explosion of the powder reserve installed in the Parthenon greatly damaged the pediments. The blast caused some of the statues to fall and others to be out of balance, making a fall possible. Morosini was then ordered by the Venetian Senate to return to the Serenissima the "work of art considered the most important and the most refined." He decided to take some sculptures from the western pediment, probably the left-wing chariot, that of Athena. However, his men were ill-equipped and the statues crashed to the ground early in 1688. Only one female head (the Weber-Laborde head) found its way to Venice.  In the same way, part of the head of one of the horses of Athena's chariot traveled to the Vatican.
  The fate of the other fragments varied: some were used as building material for houses built on the acropolis; others were bought by European collectors passing through Athens during their Grand Tour.  Excavations organized by the Greek state in the 1830s and 1840s brought to light many fragments.
  The west group B and C is very damaged because it remained on the Parthenon until 1977, as was the western female figure W. The western group B and C (probably Cecrops and Pandrose) was not swept away by the agents of Lord Elgin at the beginning of the nineteenth century because they believed that it was a repair of the first centuries of our era that had replaced the original group by a statue tribute to the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabine. This erroneous assumption was made at the end of the seventeenth century in Jacob Spon's (1678) and George Wheler (1682). travel narratives. The head of the chariot horse Helios, east C, was removed from the Parthenon in 1988.
caption: The Parthenon by Cyriacus of Ancona in 1436 : first historical representation of the building.
  This is probably the west pediment that is partially depicted, and reinvented.
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