9.1: Chapter Introduction

Introduction: Stolen Sculptures and Defiant Architecture, An Ongoing Call for Repatriation

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): View of the Parthenon at night, 447-432 BCE. (Photo: Marty CZ, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Soaring above the modern city of Athens on the Acropolis, or “high city,” the Parthenon, a magnificent temple to the goddess Athena, is striking even as a ruin, with towering columns supporting an entablature and pediments once filled with sculpture (see Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)). Although it is more than 2500 years old, its ruined state is not primarily due to its age, but to an event that happened just a few hundred years ago. In 1687, Ottoman forces occupying Greece used the Parthenon as an ammunition depot—and when a mortar from the opposing Venetian army hit the roof, the resulting explosion caused extensive structural damage. More damage was done—in the name of preservation and with dubious permission—when, between 1801 and 1803, a team led by the Englishman Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, removed about 247 feet of the Parthenon’s surviving frieze, 15 metopes, a caryatid from the Erechtheion, and fragments from the temple to Athena Nike.

Today, those Parthenon Marbles (also formerly called the “Elgin Marbles”), purchased from Elgin by the British Parliament, live in the British Museum in London—and the Greeks want them back. Repatriation, or the return of something to its homeland, is a recurring theme in this book; readers might recall, for example, the Rosetta Stone. Greece formally requested repatriation of the marbles beginning in 1983, and the debate over where they should properly live has become even more pronounced in recent years, largely based on three factors: a growing international awareness of and conversation about looted art and repatriation; the Acropolis Museum’s new building; and a recent recommendation from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles.

Greece built and opened the Acropolis Museum in 1874 to house some of the first excavations of the Acropolis, and overhauled and refurbished it after World War II. In 2000, the Museum took a radical turn, opening an architectural competition and inviting design submissions for an entirely new museum structure. With the winning submission from architects Bernard Tschumi and his Greek collaborator Michael Photiades, Greece invested in an elaborate building design and stunning displays that highlight both the works from the Acropolis and the view of the Acropolis itself. With this architectural marvel, they also took a defiant stand against the British Museum.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Interior of Acropolis Museum highlights the window-paned wall facing the Acropolis and Parthenon. (Photo: Phanatic, CC BY-SA 2.0)

The new Acropolis Museum, which opened in June of 2009, is bold both in its sleek and modern design (a contrast to the Classical style of the Greeks and one borrowed for other grand museum facades like those of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the way it dramatically takes up space at the base of the Acropolis, as if asserting itself and its importance to the city. From inside, viewers’ gazes are directed both up and down to highlight Greece’s rich past: the clean lines of the building’s architecture frame a staggering panoramic view of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, while a reinforced glass floor allows visitors to view archaeological remains lying beneath the museum. In an interior exhibit, steel beams reconstruct the pediment, supporting floating sculptural fragments and highlighting the vacant spaces where the missing Parthenon Marbles would be, reminding viewers that there are indeed missing pieces to this puzzle that are meant to be filled in (see Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\)). They quite purposely highlight an incomplete story, and point to the answer at the British Museum. The Acropolis Museum’s state-of-the-art facilities firmly defy the early British Museum’s claim that London could preserve the art better than Athens could. Seemingly forced and defensive phrasing about “requests,” “discussions,” and “positions” on the British Museum website speaks to this too.

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Interior of Acropolis Museum showing missing spaces where missing marbles should be. (Photo: Jim Forest, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In October of 2021, the Greek Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, reported that UNESCO called on the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles. Mendoni reported that the “committee urgently calls on the United Kingdom to review its position and enter into a discussion with Greece, recognizing that the issue is of an intergovernmental nature—in contrast to claims from the British side that it is a matter for the British Museum—and mainly that Greece has a valid and legal claim to demand the return of the sculptures to their place of birth.” For its part, the British Museum has stood firmly in its stance: defending itself that the Parthenon Marbles were obtained legally and rejecting UNESCO’s call to reconsider its position and return them.

Despite this, the art world is seeing shifting ground in discussions and action around worldwide calls for repatriation and restitution, restoring a work to its rightful owner. Recently repatriated items include the Gilgamesh tablet returned to Iraq, two lintels to Thailand, a ceremonial shrunken head to Ecuador, a looted statue to India, and a tattooed Maori skull returned to New Zealand. Along with the cultural artifacts and artworks physically being repatriated, there are also increased global conversations about the ethical imperative to return such works and there are now museum committees dedicated to shifting business as usual at these institutions. In studying and tracking the movement of such collections, art historians continue to trace the story of art, as it moves from artist, to collector, to museum, and perhaps, eventually, back home.

Historiography (Writing History)

Roman Replicas of Greek Originals

Many of the sculptures discussed in this chapter are actually Roman copies of now-lost Greek originals. In fact, very few ancient bronze sculptures survived the passage of time: they were lost, stolen, or melted down to reuse the precious metal. Marble replicas—sometimes made centuries after the original—are often the only evidence of the vanished original. The differences between bronze and marble can also be seen in the copies: marble cannot support its own weight the way bronze can, so struts (often creatively disguised as a tree branch) were incorporated as support.

As the Roman Empire expanded its borders in 200 BCE, many Roman generals began admiring Greek culture and collecting Greek art, thus increasing demand for similar art at home. Roman artists began adopting Greek aesthetic principles and mythological subjects, often copying famous Greek statues, and sometimes only appropriating or adapting certain elements. Artists made plaster molds of famed Greek works that could be shipped across the Roman Empire to be replicated in bronze or marble.

Roman demand for Greek art steadily increased, and by the second century CE, the Roman Empire was filled with Greek-inspired statuary, whether in homes, public spaces, theaters, or bathhouses. Often works made during the Roman period, from 200 BCE to 300 CE, replicated works that were made as long ago as 500 years earlier in Greece. Copies may be considered less valuable than originals today, but Romans did not make this distinction. They admired emulation—the attempt to improve on something by copying it. Roman artists employed great skill in adapting Greek art, made not only with different materials, but also to different scales. In many cases, Roman copies are the reason people today can appreciate long-lost Greek works.

The Greek Pantheon: A Collection of Gods

The word pantheon comes from the Greek roots pan (all) and theos (god), and refers to a culture’s collection of gods. Many figures from the Greek pantheon are familiar to us today, such as Zeus, god of the sky and king of the Olympians, often depicted with a big white beard and holding a thunderbolt. He had several notable children with his primary wife, Hera, including Hephaistos and Ares, and fathered plenty more children with other goddesses, among them Athena, Apollo, Artemis, and Hermes. Others still, like the hero Herakles, he conceived with a human woman.

Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): Zeus (or Poseidon?), c. 460-450 BCE. Bronze, 6'10" high. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. (Photo: dynamosquito, CC BY-SA 2.0) A bronze head of the god Zeus or Poseidon gazes into the distance, shown with curly hair and a full beard.

These classic mythological tales include stories of drama, anger, passion, rape, unrequited love, trickery, greed, infidelity, and revenge (a kind of modern day reality show). It is said that the Greeks made men of their gods, and gods of their men. The Greek gods were not aloof, remote, and perfect; instead they were very human, constantly scheming and fighting, sometimes going up against one other to protect their own chosen humans, as Athena defended the Athenians and Odysseus on his journeys. In Classical Greek art, humans—youthful, well-muscled, beautiful—resemble gods themselves. Because the stories of these gods were part of Greek religion and so widely known, they come up often in Greek art, particularly in sculpture.

Terminology

The “Orientalizing Period” and Orientalism

This chapter and the following chapter on Etruscan art discuss the “Orientalizing period,” which more recently has been renamed the Proto-Archaic period. The former term is an outdated and situational term that art historians used to reference the stylistic influence of Greece’s neighbors to the east (or “Orient”), particularly the Egyptians (who actually lived to the south) and Assyrians. But, as discussed in past chapters, this centers Greece, and more largely Western Europe, as the protagonist of history, central to all that occurs around them. In Marian H. Feldman’s The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean, she notes that the “Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West.”

Today, the terms Oriental, Orientalizing, and Orientalism carry their own definitions and weight, and thus, they should be used carefully and intentionally. In 1978, Edward Said published the foundational text Orientalism, in which he critiqued the European construction of “the Orient.” He argued that Orientalism was a European political ideology based on misrepresentations, stereotypes, and the European imagination. Said asserted that through such negative constructions and inaccurate generalizations, Europeans not only separated the “east” from the “west” (again, whose east and whose west?), but also rationalized subjugation and colonial rule over people outside of themselves in the so-called “east.”

Chapter Overview

Many people think of Athens, more than ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, as the birthplace of Western civilization. Athens, named for Athena, the warrior goddess who sprang fully-formed, and fully armed, from the head of her father. The capital of Greece, Athens is also home of the Acropolis and within it the Parthenon, a marble temple to Athena Parthenos (Athena the virgin). It is also the birthplace of democracy—meaning rule by the dēmos, or the people.

In 776 BCE, separate states, united by their shared Greek language, held their first joint athletic games at Olympia—the forerunner of today’s Olympic games. From that point forward, they regarded themselves as members of the community known as Hellas, with their shared Greek language as a symbol of their joint identity. (To the Greeks, all non-Greek speakers were “barbarians,” pejoratively named as such because their language sounded like “bar bar bar” to the Greeks.) The Athenians built the Parthenon a few centuries later to embody the idea of civilization and Greek triumph.

The study of Ancient Greece is often divided into different periods or ages in order to help distinguish major changes and distinct times in their long history. The following periods show the approximate date ranges explored in each subsection of this chapter:

• Geometric (c. 900 to 700 BCE)
• Archaic (c. 600-480 BCE)
• Early Classical (c. 480-450 BCE)
• High Classical (c. 450-400 BCE)
• Late Classical (c. 400-300 BCE)
• Hellenistic (c. 323-31 BCE)

This chapter starts by briefly discussing the Geometric, Proto-Archaic, and Archaic periods before diving into the Classical period of Greek art (including the Early, High, and Late periods), and ending with the particularly dramatic and cosmopolitan Hellenistic period.

Objects overview

This chapter covers famous works of art that readers have likely seen referenced many times, including high relief sculptures and architecture from the Acropolis and the Nike of Samothrace (or “Winged Victory”). This chapter will include a wide range of ancient temples, statues, and vessels, including:

• an intricately decorated sculpture of a centaur from a tomb in the cemetery of Toumba—a work so grand that it disproved the belief that Greece went through a “Dark Age” period
• the grand Dipylon Amphora, a terrific example of late Geometric Greek pottery
• the Statue of a Woman (or Lady of Auxerre) which acts as a predecessor to the beginning of Greek sculptural history
• pottery featuring African figures and a discussion of their meaning in Classical Greek art
• Kritios Boy from 480 BCE, a sculpture that illuminates the transition between the Archaic Kouros and naturalistic movement of Classical Greek sculptural traditions
• the Acropolis, featuring historically significant buildings such as the Erechtheion with its caryatids (or female-figured columns), the Propylaea, and the Temple of Athena Nike, among others
• the Parthenon, planned by the famed architects Iktinos and Kallikrates in 432 BCE
• the Tomb of the Diver in high Classical Style
• the Altar of Zeus, commissioned by King Eumenes II with naturalistic “dying Gaul” sculptures inside to commemorate victory over the Gauls, new migrants to Asia Minor

By the time you finish reading this chapter on the art of Ancient Greece, you should be able to:

• Define repatriation and restitution as it pertains to art history and museum collections
• Explain the diverse cultural influences on Greek artistic development
• Identify architectural elements invented and popularized by the Greeks
• Connect the philosophy and religion of the ancient Greeks to their values in art and architecture
• Discuss the representation of the human form through different periods of Greek art
• Describe the impact of Greek art on neighboring cultures