Metopes, the panels on a temple between the columns and the pediment, were ideal places to decorate with sculpture; they are square, and come in sets of even numbers. On the temple of Zeus at Olympia there were six at each end of the cella, the inner part of the temple — their decoration with the labours of Herakles contributed greatly to the hero’s achievements being quantified as a canonical twelve.
One of the labours is depicted here; Atlas fetches the Apples of the Hesperides while Herakles, assisted by Athena, holds up the sky. The temple was built by a local architect called Libon, but was destroyed by an earthquake in the fifth century CE
Paris, Louvre 716 & Olympia Museum 79
Purchased 28 Mar 1878 by the Fitzwilliam Museum from the casting establishment of the Berlin Museum. Transferred to the Museum in 1884
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 121 (n.9-10), pls. 46, 3-4
Richter: Sculpture & Sculptors of the Greeks (1950), figs.66, 355, 414
Becatti, G: Il Maestro d’Olympia, 44-, pl. XXIV-XXV, fig.75; pl. XXIII, fig.72; pl. XXIV, fig.72; pl. XXIII
Ashmole & Yalouris: Olympia, the Sculptures of the Temple of Zeus, 28
Walston: Catalogue of Casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889), 36, no.124
Found on site at Olympia
