The Winged Victory of Samothrace is a 2nd century BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike. It was discovered on the Greek island of Samothrace in 1863 and is now prominently displayed at the Louvre museum in Paris. The sculpture depicts Nike descending from the sky with windswept drapery to celebrate a naval victory. Despite damage, it is admired as a masterpiece for its graceful pose, dynamic movement, and realistic depiction of flowing cloth. It has become a cultural icon that has influenced many later artists.

1. Winged Victory of Samothrace
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The Winged Victory of Samothrace
Year c. 220-190 BC
Type Parian marble
Dimensions 328 cm (129 in)
Location Louvre, Paris
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of
Samothrace,[1] is a 2nd century BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess
Nike (Victory). Since 1884, it has been prominently displayed at the Louvre
and is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world.
Contents
[hide]
 1 Description
 2 History
 3 Assessment, reception and influence

2.  4 Gallery
 5 Notes
 6 References
 7 External links
[edit] Description
The Nike of Samothrace, discovered in 1863, is estimated to have been
created around 190 BC.[2] It was created to not only honor the goddess, Nike,
but to honor a sea battle. It conveys a sense of action and triumph as well as
portraying artful flowing drapery through its features which the Greeks
considered ideal beauty.
Modern excavations suggest that the Victory occupied a niche in an open-air
theater and also suggest it accompanied an altar that was within view of the
ship monument of Demetrius I Poliorcetes (337-283 BC). Rendered in white
Parian marble, the figure[3] originally formed part of the Samothrace temple
complex dedicated to the Great Gods, Megaloi Theoi. It stood on a rostral
pedestal of gray marble from Lartos representing the prow of a ship (most
likely a trihemiolia), and represents the goddess as she descends from the
skies to the triumphant fleet. Before she lost her arms, which have never
been recovered, Nike's right arm was raised,[4] cupped round her mouth to
deliver the shout of Victory.[5] The work is notable for its convincing rendering
of a pose where violent motion and sudden stillness meet, for its graceful
balance and for the rendering of the figure's draped garments, compellingly
depicted as if rippling in a strong sea breeze. Similar traits can be seen in the
Laocoön group which is a reworked copy of a lost original that was likely close
both in time and place of origin to Nike, but while Laocoon, vastly admired by
Renaissance and classicist artists, has come to be seen[by whom?] as a more
self-conscious and contrived work, Nike of Samothrace is seen as an iconic
depiction of triumphant spirit and of the divine momentarily coming face to
face with man. It is possible, however, that the power of the work is
enhanced by the very fact that the head and arms are missing.
The statue’s outstretched right wing is a symmetric plaster version of the
original left one. As with the arms, the figure's head has never been found,
but various other fragments have since been found: in 1950, a team led by
Karl Lehmann unearthed the missing right hand of the Louvre's Winged
Victory. The fingerless hand had slid out of sight under a large rock, near
where the statue had originally stood; on the return trip home, Dr Phyllis
Williams Lehmann identified the tip of the Goddess's ring finger and her
thumb in a storage drawer at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, where
the second Winged Victory is displayed; the fragments have been reunited
with the hand,[6] which is now in a glass case in the Louvre next to the
podium on which the statue stands.

3. The statue now stands over a supplementary platform over the prow that
allows a better contemplation but was not present in the original. The
different degree of finishing of the sides has led scholars to think that it was
intended to be seen from three-quarters on the left.
A partial inscription on the base of the statue includes the word "Rhodios"
(Rhodian), indicating that the statue was commissioned to celebrate a naval
victory by Rhodes, at that time the most powerful maritime state in the
Aegean.[7]
[edit] History
The great statue was carefully lowered down a ramp in 1939 when it was
removed from the Louvre and Paris for safekeeping.
The product of an unknown sculptor,[8] the Victory is believed to date to
approximately 190 BC.[9] When first discovered on the island of Samothrace
(in Greek, Σαμοθρακη — Samothraki) and published in 1863 it was suggested
that the Victory was erected by the Macedonian general Demetrius I
Poliorcetes after his naval victory at Cyprus between 295 and 289 BC. The
Archaeological Museum of Samothrace continues to follow these originally
established provenance and dates.[10] Ceramic evidence discovered in recent
excavations has revealed that the pedestal was set up about 200 BC, though
some scholars still date it as early as 250 BC or as late as 180.[11] Certainly,
the parallels with figures and drapery from the Pergamon Altar (dated about
170 BC) seem strong. However, the evidence for a Rhodian commission of
the statue has been questioned, and the closest artistic parallel to the Nike of
Samothrace are figures depicted on Macedonian coins.[12] Samothrace was an
important sanctuary for the Hellenistic Macedonian kings. The most likely
battle commemorated by this monument is, perhaps, the battle of Cos in 255
BC, in which Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedonia won over the fleet of
Ptolemy II of Egypt.[13]

4. In April 1863, the Victory was discovered by the French consul and amateur
archaeologist Charles Champoiseau, who sent it to Paris in the same year.
The statue has been reassembled in stages since its discovery. The prow was
reconstructed from marble debris at the site by Champoiseau in 1879 and
assembled in situ before being shipped to Paris.
After 1884, the statue was positioned where it would visually dominate the
Daru staircase.[14] Since 1883, the marble figure has been displayed in the
Louvre, while a plaster replica stands in the museum at the original location
of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace.
In the autumn of 1939, the Winged Victory was removed from her perch in
anticipation of the outbreak of war. All the museums of Paris were closed on
August 25. Artwork and objects were packed for removal to locations deemed
more safe outside Paris for safekeeping. On the night of September 3, the
statue descended the staircase on a wooden ramp which was constructed
across the steps.[15] During the years of World War II, the statue sheltered in
safety in the Château de Valençay along with the Venus de Milo and
Michelangelo's Slaves.[16]
The discovery in 1948 of the hand raised in salute, which matched a fragment
in Vienna, established the modern reconstruction — without trumpet — of the
hand raised in epiphanic greeting.
[edit] Assessment, reception and influence
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, side view
Despite its significant damage and incompleteness, the Victory is held to be
one of the great surviving masterpieces of sculpture from the Hellenistic
period, and from the entire Greco-Roman era. The statue shows a mastery of

5. form and movement which has impressed critics and artists since its discovery.
It is particularly admired for its naturalism and for the fine rendering of the
draped garments. It is considered one of the Louvre's greatest treasures, and
since the late 19th century it has been displayed in the most dramatic fashion,
at the head of the sweeping Daru staircase. The loss of the head and arms,
while regrettable in a sense, is held by many to enhance the statue's
depiction of the supernatural.
The art historian H.W. Janson has pointed out[17] that unlike earlier Greek or
Near Eastern sculptures, Nike creates a deliberate relationship to the
imaginary space around the goddess. The wind that has carried her and
which she is fighting off, straining to keep steady - as mentioned the original
mounting had her standing on a ship's prow, just having landed - is the
invisible complement of the figure and the viewer is made to imagine it. At
the same time, this expanded space heightens the symbolic force of the work;
the wind and the sea are suggested as metaphors of struggle, destiny and
divine help or grace. This kind of interplay between a statue and the space
conjured up would become a common device in baroque and romantic art,
about two thousand years later. It is present in Bernini's sculpture of David:
David's gaze and pose shows where he is seeing his adversary Goliath and his
awareness of the moment - but it is rare in ancient art.
The Victory soon became a cultural icon to which artists responded in many
different ways. For example, Abbott Handerson Thayer's A Virgin (1892–93) is
a well-known painted allusion. When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti issued his
Futurist Manifesto in 1909, he chose to contrast his movement with the
supposedly defunct artistic sentiments of the Winged Victory: "... a race-
automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful
than the 'Victory of Samothrace'."
The 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by the Futuristic
sculptor Umberto Boccioni, currently located at the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) in New York, was highly influenced by the statue. It bears an
underlying resemblance to Nike of Samothrace.[18]
Numerous copies exist in museums and galleries around the world; one of the
best-known copies stands outside the Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas.
The Rolls-Royce radiator figurine, Spirit of Ecstasy, was also based on the
Nike of Samothrace.[19] The first FIFA World Cup trophy, commissioned in
1930 and designed by Abel Lafleur, was based on the model.
This statue was a favorite of Frank Lloyd Wright and he used reproductions of
it in a number of his buildings, including Ward Willits House, Darwin D. Martin
House and Storer House.
Swedish author Gunnar Ekelöf made Nike a central image in his poem
Samothrace, written in 1941,[20] where the faceless deity, arms outstretched
like sails, is made into a symbol of the fight and the coming victory against

6. Nazism and the struggle for freedom throughout history. It also features in
the Matthew Reilly novel Seven Ancient Wonders, where it is fictionally made
part of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia.
In the parody novel Bored of the Rings, one character distracts another at a
crucial moment by pointing into the empty sky and crying "Look! The Winged
Victory of Samothrace!" This phrase has passed into science fiction fandom
and internet culture as a humorous allusion to overt attempts to distract.
The second-largest replica of this statue in the United States stands at
Calvary Cemetery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is 8'1" high.
On February 3, 1999, according to the Macedonian Press Agency: News in
English, "residents of the Aegean island of Samothrace, the birthplace of the
renowned Greek sculpture Nike of Samothrace, aka the Winged Victory,
embarked on a letter-writing campaign to have this finest extant of Hellenistic
sculpture returned to their homeland.
In a letter signed by the island's mayor, the locals urged Greek politicians to
intervene and request that the Louvre museum, where the statue is kept,
acknowledge that the sculpture belongs in its natural environment."
[edit] Gallery

The Daru staircase leads to the statue.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Painted by Juan Carlos Rogers, oil on
canvas

7. 
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, back view

The Winged Victory of Samothrace copy, Caesars Palace Casino, Las
Vegas, Nevada, USA
[edit] Notes