Winged Victory of Samothrace - Assessment, Reception and Influence

Assessment, Reception and Influence

Despite its significant damage and incompleteness, the Victory is held to be one of the great surviving masterpieces of sculpture from the Hellenistic period, and from the entire GrecoRoman era. The statue shows a mastery of form and movement which has impressed critics and artists since its discovery. It is considered one of the Louvre's greatest treasures, and since the late 19th century it has been displayed in the most dramatic fashion, at the head of the sweeping Daru staircase. The loss of the head and arms, while regrettable in a sense, is held by many to enhance the statue's depiction of the supernatural.

The art historian H.W. Janson has pointed out that unlike earlier Greek or Near Eastern sculptures, Nike creates a deliberate relationship to the imaginary space around the goddess. The wind that has carried her and which she is fighting off, straining to keep steady – as mentioned the original mounting had her standing on a ship's prow, just having landed – is the invisible complement of the figure and the viewer is made to imagine it. At the same time, this expanded space heightens the symbolic force of the work; the wind and the sea are suggested as metaphors of struggle, destiny and divine help or grace. This kind of interplay between a statue and the space conjured up would become a common device in baroque and romantic art, about two thousand years later. It is present in Bernini's sculpture of David: David's gaze and pose shows where he is seeing his adversary Goliath and his awareness of the moment – but it is rare in ancient art.

The Victory soon became a cultural icon to which artists responded in many different ways. For example, Abbott Handerson Thayer's A Virgin (1892–93) is a well-known painted allusion. When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti issued his Futurist Manifesto in 1909, he chose to contrast his movement with the supposedly defunct artistic sentiments of the Winged Victory: "... a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the 'Victory of Samothrace'."

The 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by the Futuristic sculptor Umberto Boccioni, currently located at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, was highly influenced by the statue. It bears an underlying resemblance to Nike of Samothrace.

Numerous copies exist in museums and galleries around the world; one of the best-known copies stands outside the Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas. The first FIFA World Cup trophy, commissioned in 1930 and designed by Abel Lafleur, was based on the model.

This statue was a favorite of Frank Lloyd Wright and he used reproductions of it in a number of his buildings, including Ward Willits House, Darwin D. Martin House and Storer House.

Swedish author Gunnar Ekelöf made Nike a central image in his poem Samothrace, written in 1941, where the faceless deity, arms outstretched like sails, is made into a symbol of the fight and the coming victory against Nazism and the struggle for freedom throughout history. It also features in the Matthew Reilly novel Seven Ancient Wonders, where it is fictionally made part of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia.

The second-largest replica of this statue in the United States stands at Calvary Cemetery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is 10' high.

The Estrugamou Building in Buenos Aires, Argentina was built in four sections, arranged around a patio adorned with a bronze copy of the iconic Winged Victory of Samothrace.

In the parody novel Bored of the Rings, one character distracts another at a crucial moment by pointing into the empty sky and crying "Look! The Winged Victory of Samothrace!" This phrase has passed into science fiction fandom and internet culture as a humorous allusion to overt attempts to distract.

On February 3, 1999, according to the Macedonian Press Agency: News in English, "residents of the Aegean island of Samothrace, the birthplace of the renowned Greek sculpture Nike of Samothrace, aka the Winged Victory, embarked on a letter-writing campaign to have this finest extant of Hellenistic sculpture returned to their homeland.

In a letter signed by the island's mayor, the locals urged Greek politicians to intervene and request that the Louvre museum, where the statue is kept, acknowledge that the sculpture belongs in its natural environment."