Headless statue of Athena

Art of Hadrian’s Villa:

Headless Statue of Athena is made of Luna marble and this

marvelous piece from Hadrian’s Villa is a headless statue of Athena of theVescovali-Arezzo Type.

The Headless statue of Athena was presumably made according to a Greek model attributed to Praxiteles` workshop.A large number of Roman copies have survived and one complete figure of this type can be seen in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Two other near complete copies are housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridgeas well as in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford .

The statue of goddess is depicted wrapped in a himation(cloak).She stands with her left hand resting on her hip and would have carried a spear in her lost right hand. She wears her aegis bordered with small snakes over the shoulders .

The aegis was Zeus` magical breastplate which he lent to his daughter Athena in honor of her role in principled warfare ,in the Homeric corpus . In most accounts ,it was described as a goat-skin construction bearing a Gorgon`s head at its center .

On the basis of the arrangement and treatment of the drapery and the attitude of the figure the hand resting on the hip, all these Roman replicas have been connected with one of the figures carved in relief on a pedestal from Mantineia in the  Greek Peloponnese . 

Athena, copy of Velletri type:

This large, now headless female figure is likely a Roman copy of a fifth-century B.C. Greek cult image. It as a copy in marble of a celebrated bronze statue of Athena sculpted by Alkamenes for the Temple of Hephaistos in Athens have identified by some scholars . Wearing the typical chiton (tunic) beneath a himation (mantle), she stands with her weight resting on her straightened left leg, while she bends her right knee. 

By comparison with another alleged Roman copy of the same Greek statue the famous Velletri Athena in the Louvre the Yale Athena can be reconstructed with a helmeted head, a raised right arm holding a spear, and a left arm held out in front of her body at waist level, with a phiale, or offering dish, in hand.