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| The Statue of Zeus at Olympia |
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Historical Notes
Greek Mythology was filled with Gods and Goddesses, but Zeus was the boss, the father, the king of the gods. Olympia was where the Gods were believed to live, and the great athletic competitions honoring the Gods became known as the Olympics (perhaps you've heard of them). So it sort of follows that the citizens of Olympia wanted the best temples honoring the Gods there, and the King of the Gods should have the most impressive temple.
So, around 466 to 456 BC, they built the Temple of Zeus and fashioned a giant statue of ivory and gold to fill the interior. The sculptor Phidias was commissioned to design it and supervise its construction. The way it was designed, to be as big as possible, the sitting figure of Zeus was 43 feet tall, almost touching the ceiling of the temple. Visitors couldn't help but wonder if he were to stand up, he'd thrust through the roof, and perhaps the colorful phrase "raising the roof" (to describe a person enraged and strutting about) came from this curious situation (since if Zeus were to stand up in a burst of anger, he's raise the roof).
The statue stood for centuries, until the Christian Emperors of Rome banned the Olympic games and closed the temples. In the fifth century AD, the statue was dismantled and shipped to Constantinople. A massive earthquake triggered landslides that buried the temple ruins for a thousand years, but they have been excavated and studied in recent times. The building itself is reasonably well documented, but the statue itself exists only in historical descriptions.
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Construction Notes
The design and dimensions of the temple were well documented, and photographs of some of the ruins today also gave me a pretty clear idea about the temple itself. The columns here were Doric (simpler than Ionic, with no scrolls at the top). I wanted some colorful banners around these columns so the four image maps I made for these all had the banners and color rings in them. In this case, the cylinders cutting the column flutes had spheres at each end, and the column actually had two sections of fluting with a cube spacer between, for the lower segment and the balcony segment.
As soon as I had the temple interior and its columns in place, I started on Zeus' throne chair. Every reference illustration I looked at showed a very ornate chair and so I piled on the booleans and filled the chair structure with decorative clutter. It's really a beautiful chair, and I almost regretted that I had to put a man in it.
Greek temples were generally very ornately decorated inside, so I used quite a few decorative image maps to dress the walls, floor and ceiling.
Finally I put Zeus himself in. Luckily he had his robe to hide most of his body, but still there was enough exposed anatomy to leave me constantly wishing I could cheat and sneak some Poser figure parts into the scene (I didn't). The wreath of ferns around his head are actually palm tree fronds from my Pyramids palm trees, recolored gold and wrapped around his head.
The hardest part of this scene was the incredibly cramped interior shape I was trying to be faithful to, which left me with very few possible positions to view the statue from.
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