Winged Victory of Samothrace
Unknown · c. 200-175 BC
A winged goddess of victory has just come down out of the sky onto the deck of a warship. Nike, messenger of triumph, lands with her left leg still trailing behind her, her torso thrown forward into a sea wind that flattens the thin tunic against her stomach and thigh while the heavy mantle unravels behind her hips. There is no head and there are no arms, yet the body tells you everything: the raised right arm almost certainly signalled a victory cry rather than holding a trumpet, as older reconstructions supposed. The monument was set up in the open air, probably to commemorate a naval success, and every element from the prow underfoot to the wings still half braked in the air belongs to a single instant of arrival.
The figure was carved from Parian marble in several blocks, while the ship's prow is Rhodian Lartos marble, a grey stone whose colour once set off the white body above it. Walk around the landing rather than looking only from the front. From the right the drapery is sliced by deep shadowed channels; from the left it clings like wet cloth, a virtuoso passage of carving that makes stone behave like water and air at once. The right wing is a nineteenth-century plaster mirror image of the surviving left one.
Charles Champoiseau, a French vice-consul, found the statue in 1863 in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace, broken into more than a hundred pieces. The blocks of the ship followed in 1879, and in 1883 the reassembled monument was installed at the head of the Daru staircase, where the architecture gives it the height and the raking light it was designed for. A cleaning and consolidation campaign in 2013 and 2014 returned the marble to a warm ivory tone and corrected the angle at which she meets the wind.
Did You Know? Her right hand was found on Samothrace in 1950 and identified only when an Austrian museum turned out to hold two of its missing fingers; the hand is displayed in a case beside the staircase.
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