The Winged Victory's ship-shaped base was left lying on a Greek beach
When a French diplomat dug up the headless Winged Victory on Samothrace in 1863, he shipped the marble goddess to Paris and left behind a heap of grey blocks he took for a tomb. Years later, Austrian archaeologists realised those blocks formed the prow of a warship on which she had landed.
Charles Champoiseau, acting French consul at Adrianople, found the torso on April 13, 1863 in the sanctuary of the Great Gods, surrounded by fragments of drapery and feathers. The statue reached Paris in May 1864. Louvre curator Adrien Prévost de Longpérier reassembled the body and displayed it alone among Roman sculptures. From 1875, architect Aloïs Hauser, working with Alexander Conze's Austrian team, drew the abandoned blocks and saw that together they made a tapering bow; sculpture expert Otto Benndorf proposed how the figure had stood, drawing on coins of Demetrios Poliorcetes that show Victory on a ship's prow.
Champoiseau went back in 1879 purely to ship the base to Paris, though he left its largest block behind. Between 1880 and 1883 the Louvre rebuilt the monument, adding a plaster right wing, and set it atop the grand Daru staircase. In 1950 curator Jean Charbonneaux found the right palm, which was joined with two fingers held in Vienna since 1875. Two grey marble pieces used to moor fishing boats below the sanctuary turned out, on study in 1996, to be the missing base block.
The statue dates from around 190 BC and is one of relatively few major Hellenistic works surviving in the original rather than as Roman copies. Carved from white Parian marble, it stands 2.75 metres, or 5.57 metres with its base. The goddess is caught at the end of her flight, wings swept back, a thin tunic pressed against her body and a heavy mantle held on only by the wind. A recent restoration found traces of blue paint on the wings.
Art historian H. W. Janson noted that the sculpture makes the unseen wind part of the work, forcing viewers to imagine the space around the figure, a device that became common roughly two thousand years later in baroque art. Greece regards the statue, like the Elgin Marbles, as taken illegally and seeks its return.
Source: Winged Victory of Samothrace
