Attalos was the king of the Greek city state of Pergamon in Asia Minor around 230 B.C. He won a great victory over the Galatians, aka Gauls, in that year and built an impressive monument to celebrate it. This work has been a major influence on Greek, Roman, and European art as you will see.
Were those pouches drawn in or added later for some reason. The Greeks were not reticent about showing the phallus. But during the Middle Ages, religious folk covered up the peters or chiseled them off classical statues.
ReplyDeleteI'm willing to bet the artist who made the drawing added the coverings.
DeleteI hadn't thought of that possibility.
DeleteWhen you consider that in all of the ancient Olympic games the participants were competing in the nude, it's not likely that this drawing was done in that time period. That type of alteration would have come from the Victorians.
ReplyDeleteThis drawing was most likely Victorian, as Greggy says, and was a representation of what the original monument was supposed to have looked like.
ReplyDelete