An Aside: Stealing Athena in photos

In photos and going chronologically, Karen Essex's Stealing Athena is a novel about the Parthenon and two women who had a major impact on its state of being.

[My photo of the Parthenon in 2004]

Perikles began building on the Athenian Acropolis in 447 BC.

[Roman copy of Pericles bust, from The Elgin Marbles by B.F. Cook]

He put the sculptor Pheidias in charge of artistic decisions and according to the book, Pheidias decided to use Perikles' mistress and Stealing Athena's protagonist Aspasia as his model for his glorious statue of Athena, known as Athena Parthenos. (Pheidias was also accused of hiding portraits of himself and Perikles in the massive statue.) Although the original statue no longer survives, today you can see Alan LeQuire's replica (based on historical writings and artifacts) in Nashville's full-scale Parthenon. (Why Nashville has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon I do not know.)

[The photo of Athena comes from the city of Nashville's website.]

Fast-forward about 2,200 years to first years of the 19th century. There was a man named Lord Elgin. He loved the Parthenon more than he loved his wife, the heiress Mary Nisbet and the other protagonist of Stealing Athena.

The photo of Lord Elgin, attributed to a 1795 drawing by G.P. Harding, also comes from Cook's book. The drawing of Mary Nesbit, Countess of Elgin, is found on the cover of Susan Nagel's awesome biography, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles.]

But by that time, the Acropolis had been used and abused. After the fall of the Greek gods, the Parthenon had been turned into a church; when the Turks arrived, they turned into a mosque. Later, they used it to store gunpowder and half the building exploded during a Venetian siege in 1687. So Elgin made it his life's mission to cart what he could back to England, thus beginning one of the art world's biggest controversies. Since he didn't have much money of his own, he used his wife's fortune. Ironically, saving the Acropolis marbles from further ruin helped destroy his own marriage. In the wake of a scandalous divorce, he was forced to sell his beloved marbles to the British Museum in 1816.

According to the British Museum, about half of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon survive. They have a good chunk of what's left, including about 60 percent of the remaining frieze and "much" of what remains of the East Pediment.

[My 2004 photos of the Duveen Gallery (top) and East Pediment (bottom)]

Now we're going beyond Stealing Athena, but the rest of the remaining frieze is in Athens. When I was there, in 2004, it was housed in the old, small Acropolis museum that was on top of the hill. (As I recall, the overflow was kept in storage.) The British Museum refuses to give them back to Athens and for a long time, one of the arguments was that Greece didn't have a proper facility in which to house them. Although the spectacular new Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 (alas, I haven't yet been), the B.M. still isn't budging - and I imagine they never will.

This subject of location is highly controversial and while I've tried to keep my own opinions out of this post, the one thing that sticks out in my mind from my trips to Athens and London is the difference in the marbles' condition from one location to the next. Say what you will but Elgin's actions led to a better preservation in the long-run - and it's obvious in pictures:

[My 2004 photos of a frieze section in Athens (top) and a metope in London (bottom)]

Anyway...that would be the end (and I am reminded once again of why I hate trying to input photos into Blogger...)