Note sull'episodio
In the fifth century BC the Eleans of Elis, keepers of the Olympic Games, had just built a new temple of Zeus at Olympia and wanted a centerpiece to outshine Athens. They hired Phidias, the sculptor of the Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon, and he produced a seated Zeus about 12.4 meters tall, so large that Strabo said the god would unroof the temple if he stood. Inspired by the scene in the Iliad where Zeus nods and Olympus shakes, Phidias built it in chryselephantine style: a wooden armature covered with carved ivory for skin and gold panels for robes, on a cedar throne inlaid with ebony, gold, and gems.
Olympia's marshy Altis threatened the ivory, so a basin of olive oil on black tiles kept it from cracking and reflected light up onto the figure. Phidias's brother Panainos painted screens to hide the frame, and Phidias carved Pantarkes is beautiful on the god's little finger, naming a youth who won the boys' wrestling at the 86th Olympiad. Caligula tried to take the statue to Rome, and after Theodosius I banned pagan cults in 391 AD it was lost either in the temple fire of 425 or in the Palace of Lausus in Constantinople in 475. Excavations from 1954 to 1958 found his workshop.
- Why ivory's matte, lifelike surface was worth the cost of importing it
- The thunderbolt legend and the bronze jar kept over the scorch mark
- Aemilius Paullus and Dio Chrysostom on the statue's emotional force
- The legend of the statue laughing and collapsing Caligula's scaffolding
- Ivory chips, gold tools, terracotta molds, and a cup inscribed I belong to Phidias