Joan Breton Connelly - The Parthenon Enigma

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2014 by Joan Breton Connelly

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Connelly, Joan Breton, [date]
The Parthenon enigma / Joan Breton Connelly.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-59338-2 (hardback); ISBN 978-0-385-35050-1 (eBook)
1. Parthenon (Athens, Greece) 2. Symbolism in architectureGreeceAthens. 3. Athens (Greece)Buildings, structures, etc. I. Title.
NA 281. C 66 2014
726.120809385dc23 2013024771

Jacket photograph by Andreas Constantinou
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
Endpaper art by George Marshall Peters

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For Louise, Thomas, and Peter

NEVER BEFORE in human history has there been a structure that is at once so visible to the world, so celebrated, so examined, so invested with authority, and yet, at the same time, so strangely impenetrable at its core. After centuries of study and admiration, the Parthenon remains, in so many ways, an enigma.

The past three decades have brought perhaps the most intensive period of scrutiny the Parthenon has seen since its construction nearly twenty-five hundred years ago (447432 B.C. ). The monumental work of the Acropolis Restoration Service in the conservation and analysis of the building has revealed a wealth of new information about how the Parthenon was planned, engineered, and constructed. Surprises, like newly revealed traces of bright paint on architectural moldings set high within the west porch, hint at the original, radiant decoration of the temple. At the same time, freshly emerging evidence from Greek literature, inscriptions, art, and archaeology has broadened our understanding of the world in which the Parthenon was built. The myths, belief systems, ritual and social practices, cognitive structures, even the emotions of the ancient Athenians, are now under rigorous review. But much of what has been discovered in recent years does not fit into the sense we have had of the Parthenon for the past two and a half centuries. Why?

Our contemporary understanding of the Parthenon and the symbolism that has been constructed for it from the Enlightenment on has everything to do with the self-image of those who have described and interpreted it. There is a natural tendency to see likeness to oneself when approaching a culture as foreign as that of Greek antiquity. How much more so this is when looking at a monument that has become the icon of Western art, the very symbol of democracy itself. With these labels comes a projection onto the Parthenon of all our standards of what it means to be civilized. In looking at the building, Western culture inevitably sees itself; indeed, it sees only what flatters its own self-image or explains it through connection to the birthplace of democracy.

This association has been reinforced again and again by the adoption of Parthenonian style for Parthenon as icon, neglecting its primary role as a deeply sacred space.

Any views that depart from the well-established contemporary understanding of the Parthenon, and its association with civic life as we know it, have been effaced, like the traces of paint and intricate detail that once adorned the surface of the temple itself. Criticism of the conventional creed is taken as an attack on an entire belief system. The long-standing association of the Parthenon with Western political ideology has, indeed, caused new interpretations to meet with enormous resistance. But there is much more to the Parthenon and the people who created it than flatters and corresponds to our sense of ourselves. To recover it, we must begin by trying to see the monument through ancient eyes.

Viewing the Parthenon as synonymous with the Western democratic system of government began in the eighteenth century, when the art

This sentiment was robustly embraced during the

In the century that followed, the growth of archaeology and an ever-increasing recognition of classical Greece as the cradle of Western civilization

By the twentieth century,

Leo von Klenze, Ideal View of the Acropolis and the Areopagus in Athens, 1846. (illustration credit )

Walhalla memorial, Regensburg, Bavaria, 18301842, )

The tendency to see oneself in ancient artistic masterpieces is not, however, limited to the adherents of any particular political ideology.

Nashville Parthenon, Centennial Park, Nashville, Tennessee, 19201931. (illustration credit )

Should we be surprised that

In 1998, the editor Thus, the Parthenon serves as both magnet and mirror. We are drawn to it, we see ourselves in it, and we appropriate it in our own terms. In the process, its original meaning, inevitably, is very much obscured.

Indeed, our understanding of the Parthenon is so bound up with the history of our responses to it that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the two. When the object of scrutiny has been thought so matchlessly beautiful and iconic, a screen for meanings projected upon it across two and a half millennia, it is all the more challenging to Lord Elgin, less a man of words than of action. In fact, during the very years of Dodwells stay in Athens, Lord and Lady Elgin and a team of helpers were busy taking the temple apart, hoisting down many of its sculptures and shipping them off to London, where they remain to this day.

Even the removal of its sculptures, however, could not dull the buildings allure. In 1832, the French poet

And so the Parthenons larger-than-life status has had a profound effect on the ways in which it has been scrutinized, what questions have been asked of it, and, more interesting, what questions have been left unasked. Too revered to be questioned too much, the Parthenon has suffered from the distortions that tend to befall icons. The fact that so few voices from antiquity survive to tell us what the Athenians saw in their most sacred temple has only enlarged the vacuum into which post-antique interpreters have eagerly rushed.