The Winged Nike of Samothrace – Nikolaos Kouvalakis

Sanctuary of Great Gods and Mysteries of Samothrace:

The Nike of Samothrace was originally erected as a military victory monument in the
Sanctuary of the Great Gods (Theoi Megaloi) on Samothrace, a small island in the
northern Aegean Sea. While the permanent population of the island was relatively
small, an influx of worshippers regularly descended upon Samothrace to participate
in religious rites hosted by the sanctuary, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman
periods when the sanctuary was at its height of popularity.
In ancient times, the fame of Samothrace came from its mystical worship of the
Great Gods, whose initiation ceremonies promised protection at sea and the
opportunity to "become both pious and just and by all means improve themselves by
sharing the mysteries", according to Diodorus. The sanctuary itself has the
undeniable aura of the sanctuary, which hosted events that shaped ancient
mythology and history. The mythical family of the island gave birth to the Trojan race
and here took refuge the last Macedonian king chased by the Romans. The Roman
writer Plutarch even says that the parents of Alexander the Great, Philip II and
Olympias, met while they were initiates on Samothrace.
The cult of the Great Gods was a mystery religion, meaning that worshippers needed
to be initiated into the cult before they were allowed to participate, and the rites
were kept secret from everyone except the initiates. Since secrecy was so central to
the cult, modern scholars do not know exactly what was involved in the rituals.
Worshippers came from throughout the ancient Mediterranean to worship, and
initiation was open to all, regardless of social class, gender, or citizenship. Royals,
elites, commoners, and enslaved people were all initiated into the cult. However, we
do know that the cult promised its initiates safety at sea and personal moral benefit.
As in the Mysteries of Eleusis, those who took part for the first time in the Mysteries
of Samothrace were called μύστες (from the verb μυώ = I close my eyes) and those
who participated for the second time were called επόπται (from the future tense
επόψομαι of the verb εφοράω = I supervise, observe, see, I turn my gaze to). A kind
of preliminary initiation probably took place in the Theatrical Circle (25). After this
preliminary ritual, the blindfolded mystics wandered in the dark in search of the
goddess Harmony, daughter of Zeus and Electra. According to the mythology of
Samothrace, Harmony was abducted by Cadmus at sea, when, in search of his sister
Europe, he passed through Samothrace. Harmony was saved and transported back
to the island by her brothers, Dardanus and Hetion, figures who are closely
associated with the mysteries and with the well-known attribute of the Great Gods,
the salvation of shipwrecks. The happy outcome of the search for Harmony took the
form of a sacred marriage. The wedding of Harmony with Kadmos was represented
in the rite of Samothrace that took place inside the Building of the Ritual Dance (17)
and was depicted in the frieze that surrounded it.

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The sanctuary was located in a narrow valley, with buildings located on the valley
floor and on terraces cut into the hillsides. The Nike monument was on the west
slope, in a niche at the top of the hill behind the theater. Placed at one of the highest
points in the sanctuary, it would have been visible from numerous viewpoints as
initiates moved through rituals.
Scholars once believed the Nike of Samothrace stood in a fountain. Archaeological
evidence for this theory has now been shown to post-date the monument, and while
there is still debate about whether the structure was roofed or enclosed by walls,
scholars today hold that the Nike group was housed in a small building, open on the
north side, with the Nike facing out over the theater. The illusion of her blowing
drapery would have been reinforced by the actual onshore wind that would have
blown across the valley.

Discovery of Winged Nike of Samothrace statue:

In 1863 a French archeological expedition led by the French consul in Edirne Charles
Champoiesau made excavations at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods in Samothrace.
As Champoiesau himself writes:
"One day as I was supervising the excavations of the Great Temple, I noticed a half-
covered marble that gave the impression of a remnant of a statue. I uncovered it and
saw a female shoulder with the upper part of the chest and the base of the chest.
The workers who were led there immediately dug up the marbles that were just a
few millimeters from the ground and immediately brought to light a flat surface near
which lay the statue that I justifiably or unjustifiably called the statue of Victory.
Wanting to find the head and arms that were missing from this wonderful body I dug
all around, but to no avail except that I found all the pieces of the wings, the folds,
the legs, the pieces contained in it. a tank that will come to Paris with the statue.
When the soil was removed several meters away from the place where the statue
was located and the volume (just below the surface) the whole monument was
unveiled, which consisted of a flint wall, a flat surface, flint stairs and finally about 20
pieces of gray-white marble, huge and carved in such a way as to look like pillars, a
kind of tower-like Egyptian buildings. On the flat surface and upside down was a gray
marble sarcophagus consisting of three pieces’’.
Champoiseau immediately arrived with his country's ambassador to Istanbul, and he
arranged the approval for a French warship sailing to Samothrace to transport the
valuable archaeological finds.

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Victories and Angels:
The Greeks represented concepts such as Peace, Fortune, Vengeance, and Justice as
goddesses at a very early date. Victory was one of the earliest of these incarnations.
She is a female figure with large wings that enable her to fly over the earth spreading
news of victory, whether in athletic competition or battle. She is a messenger
(άγγελος) who sometimes uses a trumpet to make her message better heard. As she
flies, she brings the victor the insignia of victory – a crown, fillet, palm, trophy of
arms, or naval trophy. Once back on earth, she takes part in the libation or sacrifice
made by the victor to thank the gods.
Victory is an extremely decorative figure who appeared widely in Greek art from the
Archaic period (6th century BCE) onwards. She is found in a multiplicity of forms –
statues, reliefs, vessels, coins, and terracotta or bronze figurines. Such figures
followed the stylistic evolution of Greek art, undergoing constant development. As
the Victory of Samothrace shows, the figure is still featured in spectacular works of
art in the Hellenistic period.

Nike’s statue history and destruction:

The famous Victory of Samothrace is one of the three winged "Victories" found on
the beautiful island. The second, a Roman copy, was found by Austrian
archaeologists in 1875 and is on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna,
and the third, found in 1949 by Karl Lehmann, an American archaeologist and his
wife Phyllis Williams-Lehman, who also became an honorary citizen of Samothrace,
is in the Archaeological Museum of Samothrace. Lehman and his wife also found
parts of the statue's right hand in 1950 and a few months later the fingers of Nike's
right hand in the Austrian museum, whose people did not know it belonged to the
statue and were registered somewhere.
The right hand of the "original" Victory was reconstituted, revealing that he was not
holding a trumpet as previously believed and is exhibited in the Louvre in a window,
near the statue. The original statue was a complex of goddess and ship. The goddess
was made of Parian marble and "flew" fleetingly on the marble bow of a ship, giving
the feeling that she had just "landed" on it. The ship was made of Rhodesian marble.
Experts estimate that the statue fell and broke due to a large earthquake in the 6th
century CE.
The statue was found in many pieces because in the Hellenistic years the artists
worked on their sculpture in several pieces from the beginning (in ancient Greece
only the head and the protruding limbs worked separately). So, the unknown
sculptor had edited his work in parts and then joined it, so in the earthquake with
the fall of the sculpture, it broke much more easily and in many places.

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However, the seismology books we referred to (by V. Papazahou and K.
Makropoulou) do not mention an earthquake with a focus on Samothrace or very
close to it during the 6th century CE. So, either a mistake was made in the dating of
the earthquake or a very big earthquake, very far from Samothrace, caused the fall
of the statue.

Statue and Ship base Characteristics:

Niki's statue consists of the large part from the chest to the legs, a second piece
which is the upper torso, the left wing (the right was added copying the left) and the
head - this has never been found as far as experts know (It is said that the head
probably turned to lime, like many other marbles, when after an earthquake, the
islanders used the marbles to make lime to rebuild their houses). The arms, wings
and legs, as well as many pieces of clothing, were then sculpted separately and then
the statue was assembled. The wings were made of two large marbles that were
attached to the back without external support and this created a problem of balance
in the statue, but the sculptor solved it with great art.
Nike’s wings are a mastery of marble construction. Marble is a heavy material, and
compositions that included large protruding, unsupported, large elements such as
the wings were rarely seen in earlier Greek sculpture. The now-unknown artist(s) of
the Nike of Samothrace solved this problem by creating slots on Nike’s back into
which the wings were inserted and designing the wings with a downward slope so
that the weight of the wings rested primarily against the body and did not need
external support.
The bow of the ship consists of 23 pieces of marble and shows that the sculptor
perfectly mastered the laws of physics. On a rectangular base of six marble slabs
were fixed 17 pieces that were initially joined with metal and formed three
horizontal rows that were stepped forward to form the bow. The Statue and ship
balanced against each other like counterweights and the center of gravity of the
statue were weighed so that it fell to the point where the bow was kept alive like a
real wooden boat (it is noted that the statue could not be moved without
dismantling the ship). The whole complex is considered not only a masterpiece from
an artistic point of view but also a genius.

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Marble Provenance
The Nike of Samothrace is considered by many to be the apogee of Hellenistic art
that has survived to us. The sculpture portrays a draped figure, identified as a
winged personification of the messenger goddess Nike, alighting the prow of a
warship, striding forward on her right leg, right foot just touching the ship’s deck.
The entire monument stands at an impressive 5.7m in height, with the Nike proper,
constructed of Parian marble and weighing 4- 5 tons, with a height measuring of
2.75m; her ship base, of Lartian (Rhodian) marble, weighing c. 30 tons, with height
2.01m; the stone block, placed between the upper level of the boat and the base of
the statue proper in order to maximize the visibility of the statue within its new
setting atop the Daru staircase in the Louvre, and furthermore, to mimic the
presence of the ship's fighting deck, absent from Nike's ship base as it was designed
to appear as if it were the top of the hull of a boat at the level of the gunwale,
measuring at 43cm, and the block atop which the ship base sits, measuring 36cm.
The 43cm block was added in a third restoration of the statue undertaken between
1932-34. It is also apparent that this decision was made to align the Nike of
Samothrace more with the Nike depicted on Demetrius' tetradrachms, as it is on the
fighting deck that these depictions of the goddess alight the ship.
The provenance of Nike’s monument’s marble has not always been confidently nor
correctly identified. Some assumed that her marble came from the nearby island of
Thasos, while others hypothesized that it was Proconnesian or Pentelic, based on
visual inspection. Various scientific tests on the marble of the monument have been
undertaken over the years but revealed little other than confirming that which was
visually obvious: that the white marble of the Nike proper and the grey marble of the
ship base were made of different marbles. It was the analysis of a feather and
fragments of the base undertaken in 2008, at the instigation of Bonna Wescoat and
Dimitris Matsas and under the direction of Professor Yanis Maniatis, that provided
the first conclusive confirmation that the marble used to construct the statue proper
was from the island of Paros. This testing established that the sampled pieces of the
statue originated in the Chorodaki-Lakkoi quarry, to be exact, and the marble used to
construct the ship base was lartios lithos (stone for Lartos, quarried in the areas
around the village of Lartos in the southeast of Rhodes. As a result of these tests, in
2012, a further marble provenance study was undertaken by Maniatis et al. in order
to assess the types of marble used in the various monuments of the Sanctuary of the
Great Gods on Samothrace, including the Nike of Samothrace. They used the
techniques of Maximum Grain Size (MGS) measurements, EPR spectroscopy, and
Stable Isotope Analysis. The result of this study confirmed the origins of the marble
used in the Nike proper as being sourced from the Lakkoi quarry on Paros. The
marble of the base was identified as that of lartios lithos from Rhodes. In 2013-14,
the monument's marble was once again tested at the request of the Louvre, which
reconfirmed that which was already known: the Nike proper is entirely Parian
marble, and the ship base is Lartian marble.

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This study also revealed that the marble of the body, the wings and the drapery of
the statue originated from different quarries on Paros. The marble that comprises
the upper part of the body (including the now-lost head) and the right arm originates
from the Lychnite quarries, while the large block of the lower part of the body is a
non-Lychnite variety from different areas of the same quarries. The fragment of
Nike’s right wing and the rear part of her cloak are made from this same marble. In
contrast, the left wing, fragments of the upper right wing and the fold between the
body and rear part of the cloak are carved from marble originating from the
Chorodaki-Lakkoi quarry.
Remnants of Egyptian Blue paint were found on the original left wing, indicating that
the sculpture would have been painted, at least partially, so these minor differences
in quarry origins would not have been particularly evident. They likely did not have
much meaning beyond suitability for purpose and perhaps preference of the
sculptor.

Stylistic Description
The general consensus is that the statue is best observed from a three-quarter view,
as this angle provides a superior aesthetic effect by allowing the culmination of the
striding movement and the virtuoso drapery to take full effect, the latter of which
not only contributes to the forward rhythm, but also reveals the contrapposto
torsion of the body, and creates the illusion of the storm-tossed goddess in flight.
Her stance, with the hips twisting one way, torso the other, creates a powerful
torsion in her body that evokes the contrapposto pose of the fifth-century canon.
She wears a thin, sleeveless chiton, belted beneath her breasts and below the waist
to gather the cloth in order to shorten the skirts (though the latter is concealed by
the folds of fabric overhanging her hips), which flattens out to almost complete
transparency on her torso and falls in folds to her feet. This transparency creates the
illusion of nudity as her bare torso is revealed, and her breasts are emphasized.
Overlapping the chiton is a himation, descending from Nike's left shoulder. The deep
carves of the himation create a striking comparison to the light transparency of the
chiton. The main part of the himation wraps itself around her right hip and falls
between her legs, covering her right leg down to the calf. At her left hip, however, it
has come loose, leaving her left leg entirely exposed. At the same time, a piece of
the fabric blows out behind her, revealing the inside of the cloth, making the folds of
the cloth easier to follow). Nike's energetic and powerful forward movement is
evermore emphasized by her complex and chaotic drapery, which also evokes the
strong winds of Samothrace and creates the illusion of the goddess alighting a ship
set sail amidst a storm, "battling a veritable tempest". The backward stream of her
wings half extended for balance and perhaps pinned back by the stormy winds,
further contributes to the sense of forwarding movement.

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Likewise, the panel of cloth billowing out behind the Nike increasingly enlivens her
battle against the allegorical storm, acting, as Carpenter encapsulates, "like a rudder
to her airborne flight". What's more, conservation work has revealed that the
sculptor, at the last minute, inserted a thick marble strip between this sweeping
panel of cloth and the himation proper, thus making it protrude even further, and
contributing evermore to the forward movement. It is this dynamic, dramatic and
unnatural flare of the drapery that art historians use to place the Nike of Samothrace
firmly as the zenith of the anachronistic, Hellenistic Baroque mode, far beyond the
fifth-century canon.
The movement of the work is spiral and its composition gives the impression that it
opens visually in different directions. The artist achieves this with the sharp corners
of the wings, the projection of the left foot and the emphasis he gives to the
garment that flutters between the legs of the deity. The sculptor, from the way he
carves the marble, reveals the female body with great skill and gives in a wonderful
way the impression of the thin and wet fabric, which sometimes sticks to the body
and sometimes waves in the wind. This large work, which was probably used as an
altar, was placed in an open and high space near a pillar. There may have been a
small artificial lake in this position, in which the ship seemed to be sailing.
Until the discovery of the statue of Victory in Samothrace, Victory was always
depicted in Greek sculpture and ceramics as a delicate winged goddess, flying
around the chariot of Zeus or around tripods of victorious athletes. For the first time,
however, this impressive deity is represented, in the form of a young winged female
figure, firmly supported on the bow of a ship that was part of a monumental
fountain that dominated at some point above the theater of the sanctuary of the
Great Gods in Samothrace. This monument was probably a votive offering of the
Rhodians in the sanctuary, after the victorious naval battle of Sidi (191-190 BCE),
where Rhodes had taken part on the side of Pergamon and defeated Antiochus III
the Great, king of Syria. An archaeologists' version of the tribute for many years was
that it was made by Demetrius the Besieger (337-283 BCE) when he defeated
Ptolemy's fleet off Cyprus around 290 BCE. Today, however, due to the style of the
project, the first version is considered more probable. The theatricality of her
posture with the open wings, the force of the forward movement and the deep folds
of the clothes from the blowing of the air, are intertwined with the characteristics of
the Classical Period and foretell the baroque trends of the sculptures of the School of
Pergamon.

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Hellenistic Baroque
The Baroque style is characterized by a dynamic sense of movement, powerful
emotionalism, and grand theatricality. In Greek terms: auxesis (amplification),
megaloprepia (grandeur), deinosis (intensity), macrologia (extended treatment) and
enargia (vividness). It is in the drapery of the Nike of Samothrace where these
characteristics culminate. It goes beyond simply serving a functional purpose, as it
did in the archaic period to disguise the female body, to the detriment of
authenticity; or in the classical period, where drapery became an extension of the
body rather than a tool to contain it, working in partnership to accentuate the
natural form of the body, called modeling lines, revealing what archaic sculptural
style had concealed. Once the rendering of human autonomy had been mastered,
sculptors began to experiment with motion lines, a technique involving long, double-
curving lines in drapery that indicated movement such as flight. By the last quarter of
the 5th century BCE, illusionary transparency had become another characteristic
technique, wherein the drapery of the figure, often the chiton, becomes near-
invisible to reveal and emphasize the bodily form beneath, although it always
remains evident that the clothing is its own separate entity. It has been argued
before that the Hellenistic Baroque was a pure invention of the 2nd and 3rd
centuries BCE. Yet, comparisons with earlier examples of Nikai reveal that
components of the ‘Hellenistic Baroque’, manifest in the techniques used to create
the drapery, can be seen to develop within this canon of the 5th and 4th centuries
BCE, especially in Athens.

Epilogue:
The form of a naval victory monument featuring a carved marble ship appears to be
a popular type in the Hellenistic period, and parallels for the Nike of Samothrace are
widespread—they have been found in mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, and
Cyrene in Libya. The closest parallel appeared on coins minted by Demetrius
Poliorcetes of Macedonia at the end of the third century BCE. The coins depict Nike
on the prow of a ship, blowing a horn to announce a victory.
The Nike of Samothrace, while originally located in a sanctuary on a small island in
the north Aegean, was intrinsically part of a Hellenistic world defined by the
transmission of ideas, goods, people, and artistic motifs over large distances. Today,
it is admired by an international audience in the Louvre, and its original intention
was similar. The Sanctuary of the Great Gods, promising protection at sea to its
initiates, was visited by worshippers from across the Mediterranean. The statue
commemorated a naval triumph, and its placement in this location afforded it a
broad audience, advertising its dedicator’s military prowess to the world. The Nike’s
windswept drapery, outstretched wings, and dramatic location assured that it would
have drawn the eyes of everyone who saw it.