Winged Victory of Samothrace

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace, is a marble Hellenistic sculpture of Nike , that was created in about the 2nd century BC. Since 1884, it has been prominently displayed at the Louvre and is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world. H.W. Janson described it as "the greatest masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture", and it is one of a small number of major Hellenistic statues surviving in the original, rather than Roman copies.

The context of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, discovered in 1863, is controversial, with proposals ranging from the Battle of Salamis in 306 BC to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC as the event being celebrated. Datings based on stylistic evaluation have been equally variable, ranging across the same three centuries, but perhaps tending to an earlier date. For much of the 20th century, the prevailing theory, based on the works of Hermann Thiersch and Karl Lehmann, considered it a Rhodian monument dedicated following the victories at Side and Myonessos in 190 BC, and suggested that it might have been carved by the Rhodian sculptor Pythocritus. However, by the mid-2010s, the reconstructions of the monument proposed by Lehmann have been shown to be false , and the question of why the statue was dedicated on Samothrace, which at the time was dominated by the Greek Kingdom of Macedonia, remains unanswered.

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