Some Museums of Northern Europe

Abstract

The classical museums of the Baltic cities are among the least known in Europe, and the accounts of the objects they contain have hitherto been desultory or are not recent enough to be of sufficient value. The present paper is not intended as an exhaustive register of the classical antiquities of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg, but only as a short notice of such among them as are of some archaeological importance, and about which nothing or not enough has as yet been said. Judgment on these is often precarious, because it is difficult to discover their ‘provenance’ or the circumstances of their discovery. Of the classical antiquities in the ‘Prindsen's Palast’ at Copenhagen a detailed account was given by Wieseler in the Göttingen Gelehrte Anzeigen of 1863 (pp. 1921—1952); but there is now much in the small museum which is not noticed in his account, and which therefore has probably been more recently acquired. To the archaic period belong certain terra-cottas from Santarin, found together with a few vases of the geometrical system of ornament; the latter have been published by Ross and noticed by Conze, but as far as I can discover the terra-cottas are still unpublished. Two of these are worth special attention: (1) a small slab showing a winged Gorgon in full flight, of which the execution well illustrates the development of the free figure from the relief. The body is worked on both sides, but the whole form shows the impress of the relief style in the same pose of the limbs as appears in the so-called Nike of Archermos, in the Nike of Olympia, and in the relief-figure found on the site of the Hyblean Megara. The form of all these suggests at once that the motive was originally designed for relief-work, perhaps for metal plates or terra-cotta slabs to be attached to a background.