A Life-size Antique Classical Greek Statue of Artemisia
This fireplace hearth surround is absolutely gorgeous and is exactly like the pictures. I am in love.Â
A Life-size Antique Classical Greek Statue of Artemisia
‘Artemisia mourning her husband’
An impressive life-size hand carved natural stone statue of Artemesia in classical Greek dress grasping a vase containing the ashes of her husband.
Artemesia was a naval strategist, commander and the sister (and later spouse) and the successor of Mausolus, ruler of Caria. After the death of her husband, Artemisia reigned for two years, from 353 to 351 BCE.
Because of Artemisia’s grief for her brother-husband, and the extravagant and bizarre forms it took, she became to later ages “a lasting example of chaste widowhood and of the purest and rarest kind of love”, in the words of Giovanni Boccaccio. In art, she was usually shown in the process of consuming his ashes, mixed in a drink.
Artemisia is renowned in history for her extraordinary grief at the death of her husband (and brother) Mausolus. She is said to have mixed his ashes in her daily drink, and to have gradually pined away during the two years that she survived him. She induced the most eminent Greek rhetoricians to proclaim his praise in their oratory; and to perpetuate his memory she built at Halicarnassus the celebrated Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, listed by Antipater of Sidon as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and whose name subsequently became the generic term for any splendid sepulchral monument.