Circular Altar with Hermes and Pallas Athena (100 BCE–100 CE): Art, History and Details

Circular Altar with Hermes and Pallas Athena (100 BCE–100 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Preserving two figures (plus a faint foot) striding across a curving surface, this fragment constitutes approximately 1/6th of a large circular altar or statue base. Its full circumference accommodated 12 figures—likely the Olympian deities. Athena—with spear, helmet, and stylized aegis, or breastplate—is with either the smith god Hephaistos, holding a hammer, or the messenger god Hermes, with his staff. Now lost are Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, and others. The eclectic carving style includes stylized drapery with zigzag and swallowtail folds, recalling the Archaic period (600–480 BCE), on tall and slender figures characteristic of later times.

Object facts

• Title: Circular Altar with Hermes and Pallas Athena
• Date: 100 BCE–100 CE
• Culture: Roman, said to be from Corfu, Greece
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 80 x 53.3 x 22.9 cm (31 1/2 x 21 x 9 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1915.559

A detail from the museum

Beyond the twelve Olympian deities, Greeks and Romans worshipped numerous other gods and goddesses.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Eldridge, L. G. "Classical Marbles in the Museum." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 6, no. 3 (1919): 43-63.
• Schmidt, Eduard. Archaistische Kunst in Griechenland und Rom. München: B. Heller, 1922.
• Chase, George Henry. Greek and Roman Sculpture in American Collections. Harvard University Press, 1924.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.