Ruins of Ancient Cities (Vol. 2 of 2): With General and Particular Accounts of Their Rise, Fall, and Present ConditionBucke, Charles
History
Ruins of Ancient Cities (Vol. 2 of 2): With General and Particular Accounts of Their Rise, Fall, and Present Condition
Bucke, Charles
Cities and towns, Ancient
The government claimed these treasures, and caused them to be
transported to Palermo; but Mr. Samuel Angel, an architect, and one of
the party, took casts from them, which may now be seen at the British
Museum; and of which we present the reader with an account, drawn up, we
believe, by a gentleman named Hamilton.—“Within a temporary building
opening from the fifth room, are the casts from the marble metopæ of the
great temple of Jupiter Olympius, at Selinus, in Sicily. Valuable as
they are, as belonging to a school of art prior to that of Ægina, and
probably of a date coeval with the earliest Egyptian, a short notice of
them may not be unacceptable, as no account of them is to be found in
the Synopsis, although to the public in general subjects of great
curiosity and inquiry. The legend which they tell and their appearance,
are altogether as unaccountable as mysterious. At Selinus, in Sicily,
there are the remains of six temples of the earliest Doric, within a
short distance of each other, and it was during the researches into the
ruins of the largest, called the Western, and the one farthest from it,
named the Eastern, by Messrs. Harris and Angell, in 1832, that these
ancient sculptures were found: among them there were no single and
perfect statues as in the temple of Ægina, which probably arose from the
neighbourhood being well peopled, and they had no doubt been repeatedly
ransacked. These temples may be reckoned among the largest of antiquity,
being equal in their dimensions to those at Agrigentum, in the fluting
of whose columns there is sufficient space for a man to stand.
Immediately after the discovery, application was made to the Neapolitan
Government to allow them to be shipped for England; but permission was
refused, and they are now in the Royal Gallery at Palermo. Casts were,
however, allowed to be taken, and they are these we now describe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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