AFTER A YEAR OF RESTORATION AND ENGINEERING AGAINST EARTHQUAKES, THE $20-MILLION GREEK STATUE IS BACK ON VIEW

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s spectacular "Aphrodite" sculpture is back on view in the museum’s South Italian Gallery.

The limestone and marble figure, thought to represent the Greek goddess of love, is the work of an unknown artist working in Magna Grecia, the Greek colonies that flourished in Southern Italy and Sicily from the 8th to the 4th Century BC. The Getty purchased the spectacular piece, valued at $20 million, in 1988.

The figure arrived at the Getty with the bulk of its limestone body in three pieces, an unattached marble arm, foot, head, and assorted fragments. The figure was temporarily assembled for the introductory show.

HIDDEN SEISMIC ISOLATOR

After the introductory show, the figure underwent a painstaking restoration process which included a careful cleaning, removal of rough encrustations from the body, replacement of the detached arm and foot, filling of the two massive cracks and various smaller fissures, and assembly of the figure with an integrated seismic isolation base.

Visitors encountering "Aphrodite" come face to face with the only cult figure of the period to survive nearly intact from head to foot. What they do not see is that the museum’s largest and heaviest sculpture - measuring 7-1/2 feet in height and weighing nearly 1,000 pounds - stands on a metal isolator hidden in a massive pedestal. A tensioned cable running through the center of the figure attaches the sculpture to the 1,000-pound isolator designed to allow the sculpture to glide through a major earthquake.

The isolator was designed and constructed at the Getty by Wayne Haak, a conservation technician and mount maker.

The layered planes of the isolator are designed to roll on tracks to avoid transfer of horizontal movement during a quake.

CONFIRMING 3D TESTS

The design goals were confirmed during testing at the seismic laboratories of ANCO Engineers. Working with engineers from Lindvall, Richter and Associates, ANCO conceived and implemented a test plan. A concrete model roughly approximating the sculpture’s weight, mass, and form was attached to the isolator, then both were attached to ANCO’s R-5 triaxial shake table. Both isolator and model were subjected to computer controlled excitations comparable to a nearby quake measuring from 6 to 8 points on the Richter scale. Videotapes of the tests show that the model barely shifted while the isolator and table shook convulsively. ANCO has run similar tests over the last several years for the Getty on less sophisticated isolators, most notably an isolation base for the archaic Greek "Kouros" sculpture, and for display cabinets for a series of experiments to observe the response of antiquities displayed in a variety of weighted pedestals in a non-isolated environment.