Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Artemis of the Laphira type

Here's a statue that I've been unable to post for almost a year as the original RAW file was terribly overexposed thanks to a horrendous spotlight. Well, now it's here thanks to some photoshop magic.


Anyway, the statue is believed to be a Roman copy of 3rd century original of the Praxitelean school. I am ,however, very caution about the later - far too many ancient works are, in my opinion, attributed to specific artists and sometimes, even worse, to their "schools". The piece is,even so, beautiful and of high quality.


And a detail of the head.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

An Ancient Athenian Tetradrachm


Here's a so called Tetradrachm (thus the equivalent of four drachmae), an Athenian coin from the classical period. I reckon that one Drachma was the normal pay for a worker (depending on what he did and how skilled he was) and it might be of interest to compare it to the passage below.

"Do you think you are accusing Anaxagoras, my dear Meletus, and do you so despise these gentlemen and think they are so unversed in letters as not to know, that the books of Anaxagoras the Clazomenian are full of such utterances? And forsooth the youth learn these doctrines from me, which they can buy sometimes for a drachma in the orchestra and laugh at Socrates, if he pretends they are his own, especially when they are so absurd!"

Plato - The Apology 26d-26e
Translated by H.N. Fowler 1966