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Art and symbolism

Early Christian writers, such as Clement of Alexandria and Firmicus, denigrated Athena as representative of all the things that were detestable about paganism; they condemned her as "immodest and immoral". During the Middle Ages, however, many attributes of Athena were given to the Virgin Mary, who, in fourth-century portrayals, was often depicted wearing the Gorgoneion. Some even viewed the Virgin Mary as a warrior maiden, much like Athena Parthenos; one anecdote tells that the Virgin Mary once appeared upon the walls of Constantinople when it was under siege by the Avars, clutching a spear and urging the people to fight. During the Middle Ages, Athena became widely used as a Christian symbol and allegory, and she appeared on the family crests of certain noble houses.

During the Renaissance, Athena donned the mantle of patron of the arts and human endeavor; allegorical paintings involving Athena were a favorite of the Italian Renaissance painters. In Sandro Botticelli 's painting Pallas and the Centaur, probably painted sometime in the 1480s, Athena is the personification of chastity, who is shown grasping the forelock of a centaur, who represents lust. Andrea Mantegna 's 1502 painting Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue uses Athena as the personification of Graeco-Roman learning chasing the vices of medievalism from the garden of modern scholarship. Athena is also used as the personification of wisdom in Bartholomeus Spranger 's 1591 painting The Triumph of Wisdom or Minerva Victorious over Ignorance.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Athena was used as a symbol for female rulers. In his book A Revelation of the True Minerva (1582), Thomas Blennerhassett portrays Queen Elizabeth I of England as a "new Minerva" and "the greatest goddesse nowe on earth". A series of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens depict Athena as Marie de' Medici 's patron and mentor; the final painting in the series goes even further and shows Marie de' Medici with Athena's iconography, as the mortal incarnation of the goddess herself. The Flemish sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert (Jan Peter Anton Tassaert) later portrayed Catherine II of Russia as Athena in a marble bust in 1774. During the French Revolution, statues of pagan gods were torn down all throughout France, but statues of Athena were not. Instead, Athena was transformed into the personification of freedom and the republic and a statue of the goddess stood in the center of the Place de la Revolution in Paris. In the years following the Revolution, artistic representations of Athena proliferated.

A statue of Athena stands directly in front of the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna, and depictions of Athena have influenced other symbols of Western freedom, including the Statue of Liberty and Britannia. For over a century, a full-scale replica of the Parthenon has stood in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1990, the curators added a gilded forty-two-foot (12.5 m) tall replica of Phidias's Athena Parthenos, built from concrete and fiberglass. The Great Seal of California bears the image of Athena kneeling next to a brown grizzly bear. Athena has occasionally appeared on modern coins, as she did on the ancient Athenian drachma. Her head appears on the $50 1915-S Panama-Pacific commemorative coin.