The most famous works of Phidias were the two chryselephantine
statues to which reference has just been made, and two or three
other statues of the same materials were ascribed to him. He
worked also in bronze and in marble. From a reference in
Aristotle's "Ethics" it might seem as if he were best known as a
sculptor in marble, but only three statues by him are expressly
recorded to have been of marble, against a larger number of bronze
His subjects were chiefly divinities, we hear of only one or two
figures of human beings from his hands.
Of the colossal Zeus at Olympia, the most august creation of Greek
artistic imagination, we can form only an indistinct idea. The god
was seated upon a throne, holding a figure of Victory upon one
hand and a scepter in the other. The figure is represented on
three Elean coins of the time of Hadrian (117-138 A.D.) but on too
small a scale to help us much. Another coin of the same period
gives a fine head of Zeus in profile (Fig. 117),[Footnote: A more
truthful representation of this coin may be found in Gardner's
"Types of Greek Coins," PI XV 19] which is plausibly supposed to
preserve some likeness to the head of Phidias's statue.
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