Mazara del Vallo is a town and comune in the province of Trapani, southwestern Sicily, Italy. It lies mainly on the left bank at the mouth of the Mazaro river.
Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubitably attributable sculpture by Praxiteles is extant, numerous copies of his works have survived; several authors, including Pliny the Elder, wrote of his works; and coins engraved with silhouettes of his various famous statuary types from the period still exist.
The Farnese Hercules is an ancient statue of Hercules, probably an enlarged copy made in the early third century AD and signed by Glykon, who is otherwise unknown; he was an Athenian but he may have worked in Rome. Like many other Ancient Roman sculptures it is a copy or version of a much older Greek original that was well known, in this case a bronze by Lysippos that would have been made in the fourth century BC. This original survived for over 1500 years until it was melted down by Crusaders in 1205 during the Sack of Constantinople. The enlarged copy was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where the statue was recovered in 1546, and is now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. The heroically-scaled Hercules is one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, and has fixed the image of the mythic hero in the European imagination.
The shipwreck of Mahdia was found by Greek sponge fishermen off the coast of Tunisia in June 1907. The shipwreck near the modern town of Mahdia is dated to between 80 and 60 BC.
The Riace bronzes, also called the Riace Warriors, are two full-size Greek bronze statues of naked bearded warriors, cast about 460–450 BC that were found in the sea in 1972 near Riace, Calabria, in southern Italy. The bronzes are now in the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia in the nearby city of Reggio Calabria. They are two of the few surviving full-size ancient Greek bronzes, and as such demonstrate the technical craftsmanship and artistic features that were achieved at this time.
The sculpture of ancient Greece is the main surviving type of fine ancient Greek art as, with the exception of painted ancient Greek pottery, almost no ancient Greek painting survives. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages in monumental sculpture in bronze and stone: the Archaic, Classical (480–323) and Hellenistic. At all periods there were great numbers of Greek terracotta figurines and small sculptures in metal and other materials.
The Capitoline Museums are a group of art and archaeological museums in Piazza del Campidoglio, on top of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, Italy. The historic seats of the museums are Palazzo dei Conservatori and Palazzo Nuovo, facing on the central trapezoidal piazza in a plan conceived by Michelangelo in 1536 and executed over a period of more than 400 years.
Hellenistic art is the art of the Hellenistic period generally taken to begin with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and end with the conquest of the Greek world by the Romans, a process well underway by 146 BC, when the Greek mainland was taken, and essentially ending in 30 BC with the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt following the Battle of Actium. A number of the best-known works of Greek sculpture belong to this period, including Laocoön and His Sons, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It follows the period of Classical Greek art, while the succeeding Greco-Roman art was very largely a continuation of Hellenistic trends.
The Antikythera Ephebe, registered as: Bronze statue of a youth in the museum collections, is a bronze statue of a young man of languorous grace that was found in 1900 by sponge-divers in the area of the ancient Antikythera shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, Greece. It was the first of the series of Greek bronze sculptures that the Aegean and Mediterranean yielded up in the twentieth century which have fundamentally altered the modern view of ancient Greek sculpture. The wreck site, which is dated about 70–60 BC, also yielded the Antikythera mechanism, a characterful head of a Stoic philosopher, and a hoard of coins. The coins included a disproportionate quantity of Pergamene cistophoric tetradrachms and Ephesian coins, leading scholars to surmise that it had begun its journey on the Ionian coast, perhaps at Ephesus; none of its recovered cargo has been identified as from mainland Greece.
The Victorious Youth, Getty Bronze, also known as Atleta di Fano, or Lisippo di Fano, is a Greek bronze sculpture, made between 300 and 100 BC, in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Pacific Palisades, California. Many underwater bronzes have been discovered along the Aegean and Mediterranean coast; in 1900 sponge divers found the Antikythera Youth and the portrait head of a Stoic, at Antikythera, the standing Poseidon of Cape Artemision in 1926, the Croatian Apoxyomenos in 1996 and various bronzes until 1999. The Victorious Youth was found in the summer of 1964 in the sea off Fano on the Adriatic coast of Italy, snagged in the nets of an Italian fishing trawler. In the summer of 1977, The J. Paul Getty Museum purchased the bronze statue and it remains in the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. Bernard Ashmole, an archaeologist and art historian, was asked to inspect the sculpture by a Munich art dealer Heinz Herzer; he and other scholars attributed it to Lysippos, a prolific sculptor of Classical Greek art. The research and conservation of the Victorious Youth dates from the 1980s to the 1990s, and is based on studies in classical bronzes, and ancient Mediterranean specialists collaboration with the Getty Museum. The entire sculpture was cast in one piece; this casting technique is called the "lost wax" method; the sculpture was first created in clay with support to allow hot air to melt the wax creating a mold for molten bronze to be poured into, making a large bronze Victorious Youth. More recently, scholars have been more concerned with the original social context, such as where the sculpture was made, for what context and who he might be. Multiple interpretations of where the Youth was made and who the Youth is, are expressed in scholarly books by Jiri Frel, Paul Getty Museum curator, from 1973 to 1986, and Carol Mattusch, Professor of Art History at George Mason University specializing in Greek and Roman art with a focus in classical bronzes.
The Marathon Boy or Ephebe of Marathon is a Greek bronze sculpture found in the Aegean Sea in the bay of Marathon in 1925.
U.S.D. Mazara, commonly known just as Mazara, is an Italian football team from Mazara del Vallo, Sicily. They currently play in the league Eccellenza Sicily.
The Gilt Bronzes from Cartoceto di Pergola are the only surviving Roman gilt bronze equestrian group. The monumental ensemble was composed of at least two people on horseback, of which only one remains, and two standing women.
The over-lifesize marble Dionysus with Panther and Satyr in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome, is a Roman work of the 2nd century AD, found in the 16th century on the Quirinal Hill at the time foundations were being dug for Palazzo Mattei at Quattro Fontane. The statue was purchased for the Ludovisi collection, where it was first displayed in front of the Palazzo Grande, the main structure of the Villa Ludovisi, and by 1641 in the gallery of sculptures in the Casino Capponi erected for Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi in the villa's extensive grounds. By 1885, it had been removed to the new Palazzo del Principe di Piombino, nearby in via Veneto. With the rest of the Boncompagni-Ludovisi collection, which was open to the public on Sundays and covered in the guidebooks, and where it had become famous, it was purchased in 1901 for the City of Rome, as the Ludovisi collection was dispersed and the Villa's ground built over at the end of the 19th century.
Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro was an Italian historian and archaeologist. Her main activity was in the three fields in which she made significant innovations - the High Middle Ages, archaeological restoration, and environment and landscape. President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi conferred the Medaglia d'Oro for culture and art in Vaccaro's memory in February 2001.
The Resting Satyr or Leaning Satyr, also known as the Satyr anapauomenos is a statue type generally attributed to the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Some 115 examples of the type are known, of which the best known is in the Capitoline Museums.
The Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria or Palazzo Piacentini is a museum in Reggio Calabria, southern Italy, housing an archaeological collection from sites in Magna Graecia.
The Roman ship of Marausa is the wreck of Roman merchant ship from the third century AD which was discovered about 150 metres off the coast from Trapani.
The Museo regionale Agostino Pepoli is an art, archaeology and local history museum in Trapani. It is one of the most important museums in Sicily.
Paolo Moreno was an Italian archeologist, art historian, and university professor.
