Daily Updates
Week Six: 24 October
24 October. Kelsey Blodget Reporting:
Today we visited the Museum of Palermo, a lovely museum in the midst of the city. We began our walk through the museum looking at some Phoenician sarcophagi, which had a clear Egyptian influence. One sarcophagus sculpture had holes in the breasts from where an eccentric 19th century collector had drilled them to make a fountain. There was also the sarcophagus of a five-year-old girl, significant because it was discovered completely intact. The skeleton and all of her grave goods were found exactly as they had been arranged at her death. After the sarcophagi we had the pleasure of observing the sculpted metopes from Temples E and C in ancient Selinus, modern Selinunte. The sculpted metopes from Temple C date to the archaic period, and we observed the clumsiness of some of the depictions. The facial features are not proportioned correctly, for example, and the artists were clearly trying to determine the best way to arrange figures in their scenes. In the first metope, Apollo rides a quadriga with a female deity on each side of him. The horses face the viewer, but because the artists wanted to depict all four of their legs, the back legs are shown unrealistically near the front ones. In the central metope of Perseus slaying the gorgon artists tackled the issue of how to depict a series of events in a limited space. Instead of showing just one episode out of the mythological scene, we see Perseus slaying the gorgon, Athena offering her aid, and a Pegasus born from the gorgon's blood, all apparently simultaneously. Later artists would render such events in a series of scenes to show the correct chronological order. The metopes here, however, have no theme or relation to one another as later ones do. The third metope depicts the episode of Heracles and the bandits. According to mythology, Heracles catches the bandits attempting to steal his weapons and armor, and as punishment binds them to a pole upside down. As he carries the pole over his shoulder, the bandits' heads bob up and down on each side of his lower half. Soon the bandits begin to make jokes about his rear and the size of his genitalia. Even Heracles is amused, so he lets them go. We see the bandits here hanging from the pole over Heracles' shoulder. Gravity makes their hair fall toward the ground, but in this archaic sculpture their hair is unrealistically stiff. The metopes from Temple E date to the Classical period, and we noted the artistic development between the times. Then we looked at some canopic cinerary statues from Chiusi, which grew out of the tradition of the canopic urn. Afterward we were free to wander the museum and city at our leisure, and in the evening we excitedly boarded a large ferry for Naples that had a restaurant, disco, card room, TV room, and a piano bar.
Professor Ulrich lectures on the sculpted metopes from Selinunte in Palermo.
The "Apollo in his Quadriga" metope from Temple C.
Detail of a fallen warrior from a sculpted metope.
The bronze ram from the Palermo museum.
A bronze helmut encrusted with seashells: the way it was found during the underwater excavations.
Sculpted metope of Artemis from Temple E
Sculpted metope of Perseus and the gorgon from Temple C
Sculpted metope of Heracles and the Cercopes from Temple C.