The Parthenon Enigma
Page 19
Parthenon’s sculptural program: pediments, metopes, and frieze. (illustration credit ill.46)
Much has been written in recent years about the viewing of the Parthenon frieze, the framing of its images between the columns, and the optimal lines of sight for the spectators down below.16 Truth be told, the frieze would have been difficult to see from ground level. The earthbound Athenian would, of course, have made out the profiles of figures set against the frieze’s deep blue painted background. Skin pigments of reddish brown for men and white for women would have made the sexes distinguishable at a distance. Light green and red pigment preserved on costumes worn by some of the horsemen, and traces of green paint on a few of the rocks shown on the west frieze, give a hint of how vibrantly colored the frieze originally appeared. Gilding is preserved on the heads of certain figures, enlivening their hair. Horses were painted in white, black, and brown. There are drill holes for the attachment of bronze bridles and reins, gilded sandal straps, and other details that would have fairly glistened.17 Smaller details in the carving would have been obscure, like the composition as a whole.18 But viewers would have already known the subject matter, thus easily recognizing the figures glimpsed between the columns. Still, to peer straight up at the frieze from thirty to forty feet below would have required an inordinate amount of squinting and neck craning.19
In fact, the primary intended viewers of the Parthenon frieze were not mortal visitors to the Acropolis but the gods eternally gazing down upon it. As Brunilde Ridgway’s aptly titled book expresses it, sculptured images on Greek temples were meant as “prayers in stone.”20 Conditioned as we are to focus on our own experience as viewers, it is hard to fathom a world in which the pleasure of the gods came first. But it did. The perfection of the Parthenon frieze is all the more astonishing when we consider that, apart from the sculptors who carved it in situ, very few people had the opportunity to see this masterwork up close.21
While the principal purpose of architectural sculpture was to delight the gods, humans were certainly enthralled and edified by the sculptured decoration of Greek temples. Euripides’s sketch of a chorus of Athenian serving maids admiring the sculptures of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi provides a rare glimpse into the viewing experience of pilgrims at a Panhellenic shrine. The young Ion, servant of Apollo’s temple, guides the Athenian women through the iconography, pointing out the hero Herakles (assisted by Iolaos) battling the Lernaean Hydra in one sculptured panel. “Friend, look over here!…I see him,” cry the chorus of serving maids, adding, “I cast my eye everywhere.” Ion draws the women’s attention to an image of the goddess Athena shaking her Gorgon shield at Enkelados in the battle of the gods and the Giants. “I see my goddess, Pallas!” chimes the chorus, in an ecstatic moment of recognition when the cosmic war of aeons past is suddenly rendered present.22 Visual culture was intended not merely as an aesthetic experience but also to inform and educate, particularly in matters of the common faith. Above all, images rendered the gods and heroes present within the sanctuary. The power of the image was much nearer the power of reality in such a time and place where there were no mere likenesses.
The word for “sculpture” or “statue” in Greek was agalma, which literally means “pleasing gift” or “delight.”23 Works of art needed to be perfect in order to please and honor divinities in a fitting way. It is often noted, sometimes with surprise, that the backsides of the Parthenon’s pedimental figures are carved, even though they would never have been seen once put in place (this page, second figure). Set close against the tympanum wall of the gable, the posteriors of these figures would be known only to the gods, who might well be offended by imperfections humans would not notice.
Contrary to this understanding, it is the human response to the Parthenon sculptures that has preoccupied commentators over the centuries. The first post-antique description of the temple we have is that of Niccolò da Martoni, who wrote about it in his Pilgrimage Book after a visit to Athens in February 1395.24 By this time the Parthenon had been transformed, first into a Christian church, becoming Orthodox with the great schism of Christianity around 1000 and then, after the Frankish conquest of 1204, into a Latin cathedral known as Notre-Dame d’Athènes.25 Martoni praises the precious icons that he sees within the church as well as the relics of saints and a copy of the gospels said to have been transcribed by the emperor Constantine’s mother, Helen. Martoni then describes the Parthenon itself: its size, the number of its columns (he counts sixty), its construction, and its sculptural decoration. He is particularly impressed by a story he was told regarding the temple’s marble doors: these were the gates of Troy, brought to Athens by victorious Greeks after the Trojan War. Martoni’s account demonstrates the staying power of local narrative and its role in shaping, and reshaping, the myth-history of the Parthenon.
Without an ancient source to confirm what ancient viewers saw in the Parthenon frieze, post-antique interpreters have been free to reconstruct meanings on their own. The first to comment directly on the frieze was Cyriaco de’ Pizzicolli, known as Cyriacos of Ancona. This Italian merchant, humanist, and antiquarian served as envoy for Pope Eugenius IV. He visited Athens in 1436 and in 1444, writing detailed letters, keeping diaries, and making careful drawings on each trip.26 A fire at the library of Pesaro in 1514 destroyed Cyriacos’s original drawings of the Parthenon. But copies had been made, some more reliable than others, to give us a good sense of what he saw and how he saw it. One reproduction, made in silverpoint as a presentation sample of his work for Pietro Donato, bishop of Padua, reproduces a drawing (following page) from a letter Cyriacos wrote to Andreolo Giustiniani-Banca from the island of Chios on March 29, 1444.27 In a Latin text above the drawing, Cyriacos writes, “My special preference was to revisit…[the] greatly celebrated temple of the divine Pallas and to examine it more carefully from every angle. Built of solid, finished marble, it was the admirable work of Phidias, as we know from the testimony of Aristotle’s instructions to king Alexander as well as from our own Pliny.” Cyriacos goes on to give a detailed description of the Parthenon: “It is raised up on 58 columns: 12 at each of its two fronts, two rows of six in the middle and, outside the walls, seventeen along each side.”28
Importantly, Cyriacos gives the first documented identification of the Parthenon frieze as a depiction of a contemporaneous historical event, set in the fifth century B.C. He writes, “On the topmost friezes of the walls … the noted artist fashioned with outstanding skill [representations of] Athenian victories during Perikles’s time.”29 In this letter, Cyriacos invokes the issues that have dominated discussions of the Parthenon ever since: its status as a masterpiece; its authorship and the master sculptor Pheidias; a preoccupation with counting; and, of course, the reading of the frieze as a historical event, set in the days of Perikles. We must ask ourselves whether ancient Athenian viewers would have been preoccupied with these same matters, or whether they merely reflect the tastes and interests of the Italian Renaissance, during which Cyriacos lived.
Cyriacos’s drawings suggest that the eye of the beholder very much shaped his vision of the Parthenon. They show distorted proportions and inaccurate placement of the sculptures in relation to the architecture. Fanciful additions, including winged cherubs crowding the west pediment, betray the influence of popular Renaissance types (above). The tall narrowness of his Parthenon, apparently set on a high podium, is more suited to a Roman temple than to a building of the classical Greek period. Cyriacos’s stylish Athena, shown struggling with frisking horses on his version of the west pediment, looks more like a wellborn lady of the quattrocento than a Greek goddess.30 Her rival Poseidon has been wholly omitted from the composition.
Cyriacos of Ancona, copy of drawing of Parthenon’s west façade in silverpoint and ink. (illustration credit ill.47)
Cyriacos gets his numbers hopelessly wrong, too, from his calculations of the column diameters (5 feet), to the width of the peristyle corridors (8 feet), to the dimensions of the entablature be
ams (9.5 by 4 feet).31 We must ask: Why have modern interpreters been happy to accept Cyriacos’s view of the Parthenon frieze as a representation of a historical event even knowing that so many of his other observations are completely off the mark?
The Ottoman Turkish writer Evliya Çelebi visited the Acropolis sometime between 1667 and 1669. Like Cyriacos, he saw the Parthenon very much through his own lens. This colorful courtier, musician, and litterateur recounted his expedition to Greece in the eighth of the ten volumes of his Book of Travels (Seyahatname). This work has been described as “possibly the longest and most ambitious travel account by any writer in any language.”32 By the time Çelebi visited Athens, the Parthenon had been transformed into a mosque, a consequence of the Ottoman conquest of 1458. “We have seen all the mosques of the world,” Çelebi writes, “but we have never seen the likes of this!” Çelebi is amazed by the “sixty tall and well-proportioned columns of white marble, laid out in two rows one above the other.”33 He is equally impressed with four great columns of red porphyry set between the prayer niche and the pulpit, beside which stand four additional columns of emerald-green marble. These colored columns were, no doubt, remnants of an earlier phase in the Parthenon’s reconfiguration, surviving from its days as a Christian basilica.
Çelebi’s enthusiasm for the Parthenon sculptures is palpable. “The human mind cannot indeed comprehend these images—they are white magic, beyond human capacity,” he writes. Extoling the “hundreds of thousands of works of art carved in white virgin marble,” he observes that “whoever looks upon them falls into ecstasy and his body grows weak and his eyes water for delight.”34 Çelebi further reflects that in these sculptures the “human forms seem to be endowed with souls.” His imagination gets the better of him, however, when he attempts a catalog of the figures he sees. “Whatever living creatures the Lord Creator has created, from Adam to the Resurrection, are depicted in these marble statues around the courtyard of the mosque,” he writes. “Fearful and ugly demons, jinns, Satan the Whisperer, the Sneak, the Farter; fairies, angels, dragons, earth-beasts;…sea-beasts, elephants, rhinoceri, giraffes, horned vipers, snakes, centipedes, scorpions, tortoises, crocodiles, sea-sprites; thousands of mice, cats, lions, leopards, tigers, cheetahs, lynxes; ghouls, cherubs.”35 The mind reels attempting to reconcile Çelebi’s report of this fantastical menagerie with what we know of the Parthenon sculptures today.
It is, however, the expedition of the artist James Stuart and the amateur architect Nicholas Revett, organized on behalf of the Society of Dilettanti from 1751 to 1753, that has had the most lasting impact on our understanding of the Parthenon sculptures. The English travelers surveyed, calculated, and drew the Parthenon, presenting their work in a sumptuous multivolume publication, The Antiquities of Athens: Measured and Delineated.36 In volume 2, published in 1787, the authors present drawings of the Parthenon frieze, offering as well an interpretation of what it depicts: the Panathenaic procession.37 Stuart and Revett identified the cavalcade and chariots moving from west to east along the flanks of the Parthenon as the Athenian army following behind bearers of offerings, musicians, maidens, elders, and those who lead animals to sacrifice (below and this page–this page and front of book). In the eyes of Stuart and Revett, the marchers collectively represent the Athenian citizenry celebrating the great city feast of the Panathenaia.38
The procession marches toward gods seated either side of a group of five mortals at the very center of the east frieze, positioned just above the door of the temple. We see a woman with two girls, at left, and a man and a child holding a piece of cloth, at right (this page and this page and front of book). The identification of this scene rests firmly on the assumption that the cloth displayed is the sacred dress, or peplos, of Athena, a gift presented to the goddess as the culminating event of the Panathenaic ritual. But Stuart and Revett first advanced this idea only tentatively and as a query: “May we not suppose this folded cloth to represent the peplos?”39 Over time, their gentle question has hardened into established dogma.
Parthenon frieze, sequence and direction of procession. (illustration credit ill.48)
Seldom has this view been challenged over the past 220 years, though it has presented enormous difficulties for a coherent reading of the frieze. This central panel of the east frieze has long been called the “peplos scene” or sometimes even the “enigmatic peplos incident,” a highly unsatisfactory name for what plainly seems to be the climax of the entire composition,40 prominently set above the main door of the temple, where anyone entering might look up and see it. Interpreters have struggled to understand whether the image shows the presentation of the new peplos to Athena or the folding up and putting away of the old peplos.41 This second view would certainly be something of an anticlimax, obliging us to ask why there might be such a postlude in what should be a place of culmination and central meaning.
Scholars have assembled lists of all the elements we should expect to find in a Panathenaic procession, gathered from sources of late classical through Byzantine date. But their lists do not match what we see on the Parthenon.42 We know that a wellborn maiden, called a kanephoros after the basket, or kanoun, that she carried, was chosen to lead the Panathenaic procession.43 But we see no basket bearer on the frieze.44 Athenian allies are known to have served as tribute bearers in the procession and resident foreign women as water bearers. These, too, however, are absent. At least from the fourth century B.C. but probably even earlier, a wheeled ship-cart transported the peplos, hoisted like a sail up its mast, as it made its way in procession through the Agora and up the Sacred Way to the Acropolis. But this spectacle is nowhere to be seen on the frieze.45 Above all, we miss the hoplites, the famous foot soldiers who were the heart and soul of the Athenian army from the Archaic period on.46 If the Parthenon frieze does indeed show a fifth-century Athenian army, the hoplites could not conceivably be omitted.
Equally strange is the presence of figures we would not expect to find in a Panathenaic procession. We see men bringing heavy water jars (this page and this page and front of book), when we know that it was foreign women who carried water for the Panathenaia.47 Even more troubling is the anachronistic appearance of chariots, which had not been used in Greek warfare since the Late Bronze Age, some seven hundred years earlier.48
The reading of the frieze as a contemporary event set in the fifth century B.C. would also propose a singular exception to all conventions for Greek temple decoration, which consistently derived its subject matter from myth.49 Indeed, recent work on the function of images in ancient Greece has stressed their primary role as vehicles to help us see what could no longer be seen, that is, the legendary days of the mythical past.50 Visual representations served as markers of memory (hypomnemata or mnemeia) for what once was, and so it seems strange to memorialize the same spectacle that could be observed in the flesh each year at the Small Panathenaia or every fourth year (on a grander scale) at the Great Panathenaia. It would not square even with the rest of the Parthenon’s sculptural program. The pediments indisputably show the birth of Athena and the contest of Poseidon and Athena for patronage of the city. Its metopes show gods battling Giants and Greeks fighting Amazons, Centaurs, and Trojans. Why should the frieze depart from this otherwise mythological program?
North frieze, Parthenon, showing animals led to sacrifice, offering bearers, musicians, elders, chariots, and horsemen. (illustration credit ill.49)
This was a question asked repeatedly by the architectural historian A. W. Lawrence, who followed his famous older brother, T. E. Lawrence, in the study of archaeology at Oxford. Arnold went on to hold the Laurence Chair in Classical Archaeology at Cambridge from 1944 to 1951. Many of Arnold Lawrence’s perspicacious insights have stood the test of time, above all his concern for the anomaly posed by the traditional reading of the Parthenon frieze. “This must have verged on profanation,” he writes in his 1951 article “The Acropolis and Persepolis.” “At every other Greek temple the sculpture illustrates mythological
scenes.”51 Twenty years later, Lawrence reiterated this concern: “Never before had a contemporary subject been treated on a religious building and no subsequent Greek instance is known … The flagrant breach with tradition requires explanation.”52
To be fair, some scholars have argued for a mythological interpretation, but no known myth could be adduced that adequately fit the images. Already fifty years ago, Chrysoula Kardara read the central panel of the east frieze as a representation of the inauguration or first Panathenaic festival, an overall approach that makes very good sense, though she did not have the benefit of the surviving text of Euripides’s Erechtheus.53 Kardara identified the figures in the central panel (above and this page) as King Kekrops and the child Erechtheus/Erichthonios handing over the new peplos to Athena. She saw the female figures at left of the scene as Mother Earth (Ge) with two of Kekrops’s daughters. Kristian Jeppesen, who likewise wrote before the Erechtheus fragments were found, identified the adult male figure at the center of the scene as Boutes, brother of Erechtheus, standing with the child Erichthonios. He saw the female figures at the left as the three daughters of Kekrops: Herse, Aglauros, and Pandrosos.54 Some interpreters reject any and all notions of a unified narrative subject for the frieze, seeing it as a series of images with multiple meanings. Still others, unwilling to see the frieze as a snapshot of reality but unable to find a myth to fit, view it as a vague reference to a timeless, generic Panathenaia.55
Erechtheus and family flanked by Hera and Zeus (at left), Athena and Hephaistos (at right), east frieze, Parthenon. (illustration credit ill.50)
Burkhard Fehr sees no link whatsoever between the Parthenon frieze and the Panathenaia.56 Instead, he reads the frieze as a comprehensive discourse on Athenian democracy, illustrating the correct behavior of members of the community within this democratic system. For Fehr, the central panel of the east frieze presents an exemplum of the ideal family unit. We are looking at the Greek oikos (household) in which a mother trains her daughters in textile production while the father presents his young son with a himation (mantle), the ultimate symbol of citizen status.