Parthenon Frieze

The Parthenon frieze is the high-relief Pentelic marble sculpture created to adorn the upper part of the Parthenon's naos.

It was sculpted between c. 443 and 437 BC,^[1] most likely under the direction of Phidias. Of the 160 meters (524 ft) of the original frieze, 128 meters (420 ft) survives—some 80 percent.^[2] The rest is known only from the drawings attributed to French artist Jacques Carrey in 1674, thirteen years before the Venetian bombardment that ruined the temple. Along with the Metopes of the Parthenon and Pediments of the Parthenon, it forms the bulk of surviving sculpture from the building.

The majority of the frieze is at the British Museum in London (forming the major part of the Elgin Marbles); the largest proportion of the rest is at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and the remainder of fragments shared between six other institutions.^[3] Casts of the frieze may be found in the Beazley archive at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, at the Spurlock Museum in Urbana, in the Skulpturhalle at Basel and elsewhere.^[4] The part of the frieze in London has been claimed by Greece, and British and Greek authorities are negotiating over its future.^[5] On March 24, 2023, a relief fragment of a young man from "Block 5" of the frieze was repatriated to the Acropolis Museum from the Vatican Museums.^[6]