The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal Volume 5 1977

THE HEROIC GRAECO-ROMAN ZEUS FROM THE
VILLA D'ESTE AND MARBURY HALL: A CULT
IMAGE CREATED AFTER A MAJOR HELLENIS-
TIC (PERGAMENE) PROTOTYPE
Although damaged, the head of this masterpiece
acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum has never been
broken 1 . Its strongly Hellenistic character indicates that
this statue goes directly back to a Zeus in a temple at
Pergamon around 160 B.C. or to a similar statue in
precious materials, bronze, or marble created for a city
of the East under Pergamene influence. The original of
the statue which Clarac and Michaelis admired in
Cheshire in its restored condition is not to be associated
with the Capitoline Jupiter of about 80 B.C. and the
descendents of that later cult image, for the head of the
Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill was much less free, much
more academic in the tradition of the Otricoli Zeus, the
large statue in the Vatican, and, ultimately, the work of
Bryaxis (the Younger) at the outset of the Hellenistic
age.
The head of the Zeus from Marbury Hall betrays an
original as filled with emotion as those of the gods of
the Altar of Zeus Soter which once stood at Pergamon,
and clearly derived from the same workshop. Adolf
Michaelis wrote of the head as having a "good-natured
expression", but this may have been due to the older
restoration, which must have smoothed out and
idealized the features. Actually, all aspects of the face of
the Marbury Zeus are rather fearsome to behold, as
befits a monumental statue of the so-called Second
Pergamene School. Although slightly toned down by the
copyist and somewhat smoothed over in antiquity and
the post-Renaissance period, the muscles follow the
proportions of the Zeus from the principal frieze of the
Altar of Zeus 2 . The fact that, for a late Hellenistic
1) H.: 2.07m. Coarse-grained Greek (island ) marble. A.
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Cambridge 1882, p.
501, no. 1; Clarac, 111. 396D, 666A; C.C. Vermeule, Hesp. 45,1976, p.
71, pi. 12d (inv. no. 73.AA.32).
2) M. Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age, New York 1955,
p. 115, fig. 459.
Fig. 1 Zeus Marbury Hall
creation or a Graeco-Roman copy, head and body are
more than normally dependent on Pergamene models
can be understood by comparison with the statue of
Poseidon in the National Museum at Athens, from
Melos, which has been identified as classicizing work of
the middle of the second century B.C. 3 The seated god,
presumably Chronos, watching the birth of his son Zeus
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