Pdf / English / 1967 / 188 pages / 31.1 MB

by Bernard Ashmole and Nicholas Yalouris; with new photographs by Alison Frantz.

This volume will meet the long-felt need for a simple, fully illustrated account in English of the sculptures of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. This Doric temple stood in the greatest sanctuary of Zeus, where the Olympic Games were held, and the marble sculptures—most of them over life-size—were carved between 468 and 456 B.C.

Representing the preparations for the chariot-race of Pelops, the fight with the centaurs at the wedding of Peirithoos, and the Labours of Herakles, they are among the masterpieces of the Early Classical period, when Greek sculptors began to show a new interest in anatomy and drapery and in the natural rendering of movement, and made fresh attempts to capture reality. In late antiquity the temple was destroyed by earthquakes and floods, but the sculptures were excavated in the nineteenth century, and nearly all of them are now in the Museum of Olympia.