Winged Victory of Samothrace

She has lost her head and both arms, yet the Nike of Samothrace remains one of the most physical, wind-filled figures that survive from antiquity. Carved in white Parian marble early in the 2nd century BC, the goddess of Victory is shown at the very instant of landing on the prow of a warship: the right foot has just touched down, the left leg still trails behind, the great wings are swept back, and a thin chiton is plastered against her body by a headwind the sculptor never carved but makes you feel. With its ship-shaped base the monument rises about 5.6 m; the figure alone is 2.75 m. It is one of the very few major Hellenistic statues known from the original rather than a Roman copy.

The statue was found in April 1863 by Charles Champoiseau, a French consular official, in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean. He sent the marble torso and a heap of feather and drapery fragments to Paris and left behind a jumble of grey stone blocks he took for a tomb. It was Austrian excavators in the 1870s who worked out that those blocks, once fitted together, formed the bow of a war galley, complete with oar boxes; Champoiseau went back in 1879 to fetch them. The grey marble has been traced to quarries at Lartos on Rhodes, an island famous for its fleet. The Louvre joined figure and ship in the early 1880s, rebuilding the missing right wing in plaster as a mirror of the surviving left one, and set the ensemble on the landing of the Daru staircase, where it has presided ever since, apart from wartime years spent at the Château de Valençay. A palm of the right hand, found on Samothrace in 1950 and matched with two fingers that had been kept in Vienna, is shown close by.

The composition was made to be seen from one angle. Approach the landing and drift to your right, so that you face the goddess three-quarters from her left: from there the lines lock into a single triangle and the drapery, deeply undercut between the legs and pressed flat across the belly, reads as wind in motion. Walk round to the other side and the carving becomes noticeably summary, a reminder that the statue once stood in a set position within its sanctuary. A cleaning and study campaign in 2013 and 2014 revealed traces of blue paint on the wings and slightly reset the monument to ease the flow of visitors on the stairs. Greece has asked for the sculpture's return, as it has for the Elgin Marbles in London.

The Nike is only one draw in the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, which fills the former royal palace in the centre of Paris beside the Tuileries Gardens. Since 1993 the main entrance has been the hall beneath I. M. Pei's glass pyramid in the Cour Napoléon.

Getting there

The statue is in the Louvre in central Paris, not on Samothrace. The nearest Métro stations are Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre, which has an underground link to the Carrousel du Louvre, and Louvre–Rivoli. Paris-Orly Airport (ORY) is about 16 km away and Paris Charles de Gaulle (CDG) about 23 km. The find site, the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, lies on Samothrace some 50 km offshore from Alexandroupoli, whose airport is Alexandroupoli Democritus (AXD).