16Minerva

Unlike all the other busts on campus, this does not show a human being, but the Roman goddess Minerva.
She corresponds to the Greek goddess Athena, the daughter of Zeus and Metis. Greek mythology recounts that Zeus devoured the pregnant Metis. Afterwards he suffered from a headache and called upon Hephaestus, blacksmith and the god of fire, to split his head with a hammer. As a god, he survived the procedure, and Athena emerged from his split skull, fully outfitted in armour. Since then, Athena has been regarded as an embodiment of the mind.

Athena/Minerva was considered the goddess of cities, wisdom, strategy and tactical warfare. She was the patron goddess of poets, teachers and craftsmen, of the arts and sciences and guardian of knowledge. In ancient times her image adorned temples, seals and coins. Even after antiquity, her portrait continued to be found on buildings and institutions. It became a symbol of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, founded in 1911, and its successor organization to the present day, the Max Planck Society.

After the Kaiser Wilhelm Society chose Minerva as its emblem in 1926, sculptor Carl Ebbinghaus was commissioned to create this bust on the building of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for brain research. Similar busts also adorn other institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, in Berlin-Dahlem and elsewhere.