North Pediment
East Terrace
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia PA
2016

Carl Paul Jennewein was a classical sculptor who was particularly interested in combining sculpture with architecture. His sculptures for the north pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art draw their content and technique from ancient Greece.

The pediment contains thirteen figures of classical mythology which illustrate the theme of sacred and profane love in Western civilization. The central figure is Zeus, ruler of the gods.

https://hoagonsight.com/up-close-with-philadelphias-largest-naked-people/

Gigantic in size, unusual in color and proudly displaying their private parts, the pantheon of ancient Greek gods and goddesses ensconced at the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art building may be one of the city’s most overlooked cultural treasures. Entitled “Western Civilization,” the arrangement of highly-colored ceramic statues features Grecian deities, humans, a cave-dwelling monster, several animals and an anthropomorphic tree. It’s been overlooking the city from the highest point on Fairmount Hill for nearly a century.

Polychrome, which simply means “many colors,” was a a glazing technique used by the Greeks to brightly color their religious statuary. Terra cotta is a kind of earthenware — a ceramic — that is fired in a kiln. The project required research to re-establish the art and skill of creating such massive polychrome terra cotta figures.

In the 1920s, Philadelphia’s leaders were determined to enhance the city’s status by building an art museum as grand as the classical temples of Ancient Greece. Much of the museum’s architecture, along with its pediment sculpture, was modeled on those of the ancient Temple of Zeus.


If you spend any time on the Philadelphia Museum of Art‘s huge front plaza (the plateau to which the Rocky steps ascend) you may notice that, although they pass below it by the thousands, few visitors ever really notice the massive pediment sculpture 90 feet above them. But binoculars or a telephoto lens provide quite a different sight. What a popular selfie experience it would make at ground level; imagine standing, selfie stick in hand, between a 12-foot-high Zeus, penis in full view, and Aphrodite, the Goddess of love, all but totally naked beside him.

‘Sacred and profane love’
In the 1920s, the figures were molded, cast, and fired at the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in Perth Amboy, N.J., in huge new kilns built to handle the extraordinary project. The architect called the pediment display “Western Civilization,” saying it commemorated “the influences that shaped Western art, with the central, supreme Zeus representing the creative force or the will of man.” The whole thing, he said, “symbolized the two great defining themes of human art and civilization: sacred and profane love.”

Seen up close, the ceramic figures of the pediment sculpture are striking in how completely new and unblemished they look after so many decades of continuous exposure to the elements.

The three pediments surrounding the Museum’s eastern courtyard were supposed to have similar groups of polychrome statuary. But after the heroic labors required to produce the first set, Atlantic Terra Cotta Company went bankrupt and closed. Today, the other two pediments remain empty.