Not 100% sure what I feel about these, they were cheap, but not that cheap, i.e. 'all the money', and I can't blame the seller, as I enthusiastically talked myself into them! I thought they were plaster or chalkware with a bit of age, but they are actually some relatively modern, resinated polystone stuff, and they are bulky, filling a whole half-fruit box - my temporary storage unit of choice, as they stack!
Timpo
To be honest, in conversation with the seller, I think the situations was the same when he acquired them, thinking "Ooh, brilliant", then getting them home and thinking "What the flying-phuq was I thinking?!", but, they are my problem now, and it gives me my first and probably only opportunity on this blog to pull from my history of architecture modules!
Sadly I only had Roman figures to hand, for the photo-opportunity (the whole reason for selling them to myself!), while the three buildings are all, obviously, Greek! This being a reasonable rendition of the relatively iconic temple of Athena-Nike on the Acropolis, combining two goddesses who had been separate, one - Nike - being at various times the goddess of victory and/or subservient to the other - Athena, daughter of Zeus.
Blue Box
In fact all three subjects are from the Acropolis, and this with it's famous Caryatids (maidens of Karyai [Caryae], a village in Ancient Sparta) is the south porch of the Erechtheion (or 'Erechtheum'), which is the most architecturally interesting of the many ruins on the mount, being build over several levels, to account for changes in the ground elevation (solid rock) of more than three meters. It also has several 'rooms', including this entrance vestibule.
Kinder
The Parthenon, also dedicated to Athena, and look at the state of it! Lord Elgin, in the context of the time, and who he was, bought the friezes fairly and spent a small fortune getting them back to the UK (he also saved one of the caryatids, the ones actually on the temple now are ground marble plaster (polystone!) copies, with the other five (laser-cleaned) in the Acropolis museum), he literally saved them for humanity, years before the Greeks were prepared, equipped or even minded to do so for themselves. The noise surrounding the marbles is all political, with a bit of roguish nationalism thrown in.
I don't know if they are locally produced decorative pieces/garden ornaments, or Greek tourist keepsakes, but given how chunky they are I suspect the former, with TKMaxx, Matalan or a Squire's Garden Centre being the more-likely source, but then you remember the size of the larger figures on Carrara marble from Italy, sold as tourist trinkets, and the wonder remains?
Anyway, they are here now, and you can see that they do make quite useful bas-relief props for figure photography, so they'll stay for a while! Many thanks again to Adrian Little, Barney Brown, Brian Carrick, Chris
Smith, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul Stadinger, Peter Evans and Trevor
Rudkin, for contributions to this year's plunder-pile, and it's only eight-and-a-bit months to the next show!
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