Athenian silver tetradrachm, ca. 450 B.C. (illustration credit ill.107)
For those who made the cut, the benefits of belonging were enormous. Citizens alone could own land and household properties and assume the considerable rights and duties of the propertied class.154 They could purchase leases for the silver mines at Laureion, receive windfall distributions of cash and corn, participate in tribal and public festivals, and hold public offices and priesthoods. Only citizens could vote, speak, and plead in the law courts and in the assembly. Thus the citizenry utterly monopolized economic, legal, political, and social privileges at Athens. It is no wonder that Athenians jealously guarded this identity, keeping the system stable throughout the fifth and fourth centuries and for much of the Hellenistic period.
The legend of autochthony played beautifully into the perpetuation of this system. It has been shown that the concept of indigenousness was introduced during the first half of the fifth century in tandem with the advancement of a democratic ideology that asserted political equality for all citizens. Under a common autochthonous origin, even the lowliest citizen was of noble birth and, therefore, superior to any noncitizen. This was especially important in a cosmopolitan city like Athens where the population of outsiders was ever growing. These noncitizens included many with greater wealth than the majority of true Athenians.155
Thus, we can understand why the story of Erechtheus and his family reemerged at precisely this time, in the age of the Parthenon. It provided an important model not only for autochthony but for the new inclusion of Athenian women in the requirements of citizenship. As we have seen, under the Periklean citizenship law one had to be born not only of a citizen father but also of a woman whose father was a citizen. The mother, furthermore, had to have been accepted as a legitimate member of her father’s brotherhood group (phratry) and township (deme).156
Certainly, there is no greater spokesperson for the exclusivity of Athenian citizenship than Praxithea herself. Her formidable speech in the Erechtheus is as xenophobic as it is patriotic:
First, I could not find a better city than this one. We are a people born from this land, not brought in from elsewhere. Other cities are founded as if by throws of the dice; people are imported to them, different ones from different places. A person who moves from one city to another is like a peg badly fitted into a piece of wood: a citizen in name, but not in action.
Euripides, Erechtheus F 360.5–13 Kannicht157
By this time, Praxithea has already made clear her harsh views on adoption: “Where is the advantage in adopted children? We should consider those truly born better than mere pretences.”158 Later in the play, we find a fragmentary line that further disparages “otherness.” The speaker, who seems to be Erechtheus himself, remarks: “The region beyond is inhabited, I believe, by barbarians who eat no fish.”159 Nothing could have been stranger to an Athenian than people who prefer a fish-free diet.
Athenians believed themselves superior to everyone else, in the Greek world and beyond, and looked upon outsiders—fish eaters and abstainers alike—with a measure of contempt. The irony, perhaps, from our perspective at least, is that such chauvinism was the lifeblood of their notion of democracy. Only with pure Athenian blood could the delicate balance of sacrifice and privilege be assured to function. The ethnically variegated, those random assemblies of strangers constantly streaming in, with no genetic loyalty to the polis, might as easily favor tyranny and oligarchy, if it seemed convenient.160 Citizenship according to authentic Athenian descent was the only way to safeguard the system that had been so hard-won, wrestled from the tyrants of the sixth century. It also ensured that privileges were guaranteed even to those true Athenians who had few possessions or skills.161 Thus was Athenian democracy in essence a system for distributing privileges and responsibilities according to pedigree. Autochthony transcended wealth, power, and any other status.
Athens stood out among all cities of its day for the level of personal engagement that it allowed citizens in the management of their polis.162 For this system to work required not only genetic affiliation but proper formation, too. The city instructed its young in the responsibilities, no less than the privileges, of politeia from a very early age. Paideia and the socialization of citizen offspring took precedence over everything else, performance in choral song-dance, athletic competitions, and public ritual being entirely mandatory. The institution of the Panathenaia was in this sense the great showcase of the formation efforts: not merely the ritual extravaganza of the year, but a way of ensuring that the mold would stay more or less intact across the generations. The procession at the heart of the festival was all the reminder an impressionable soul needed about his or her place in the world. Making their way from the Kerameikos cemetery and the graves of the ancestors, through the Athenian Agora, the great scene of commerce, and up the slopes of the Acropolis to the sacred precinct of Athena, the living felt themselves linked in a great chain to the dead and to the gods.163
Perhaps, then, it is not so surprising that one of the most revolutionary concepts to emerge from democratic Athens is the notion that a citizen should be in love with his city. Indeed, Euripides puts on Praxithea’s lips some of the most startling words ever uttered by a mother: “I love my children but I love my country more.” The queen goes on to lament that others do not share the depth of her fervor: “O fatherland, I wish that all who dwell in you would love you as much as I do! Then we would live in you untroubled and you would never suffer any harm.”164
Perikles himself is credited with having introduced the concept of this emotional bond to the polis. Nowhere is this more eloquently expressed than in his funeral oration for the first to fall in the Peloponnesian War. Looking out at the mourners and up at the Acropolis, Perikles instructs:
You must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.43165
LOVE, COURAGE, DUTY, HONOR, and action: these are the virtues that upheld Athenian democracy. And if the burdens were compensated by substantial rewards, no Athenian would have traded this birthright for five times the gold of the richest man in the polis. The values of politeia were deeply ingrained and subscribed to by even the most ironically minded. To be an Athenian was in the end to profess a religion, and civic performance was the expression of one’s identity as well as devotion. Performance was the means by which the young were educated and thereby the values of the community perpetuated. Procession, recitation, musical and athletic competitions, singing, dancing, sacrificing, and feasting—all these actions constituted a greater “prayer” to Athena. They delighted the goddess and commemorated the ancestors while uniting the citizenry under the banner of collective celebration. No less than a hundred head of cattle or the lavishly embroidered peplos, the communal expenditure of energy through motion, exertion, and competition was a votive offering. Naturally, it took forms that expressed the Athenians’ special love of excellence and beauty, as well as their healthy appetite for rivalry and contest, fed by an extravagant self-regard.
8
THE WELL-SCRUBBED LEGACY
The Sincerest of Flattery and the Limits of Acquired Identity
HE GOT AS FAR AS the inside of a cigar box. Opening the lid of Argüelles, the Havanas that Lopez & Brothers sold out of Tampa, Florida, one could find a portrait of the artist in a prospect of laurel leaves and scenes from his painting Sappho of 1881. By then, he had amassed a fortune and every honor available to a Victorian gentleman. But his success did not sit well with every set in London. “The case of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema is only an extreme instance of the commercial materialism of our civilization,” sniffed the eminent critic Roger Fry, a member of the Bloomsbury Group. “Doubtless most real artists covet honestly enough a tith
e of Sir Lawrence’s money. That does not smell. But his honors! Surely by now, that is another thing. How long will it take to disinfect the Order of Merit of Tadema’s scented soap?”1
It took around sixty years. A shrewd businessman and jolly good company, Alma-Tadema was among the most financially successful painters of his day. Offering colorful images of toga-clad Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians luxuriating in romantic architectural settings, he delighted a Victorian public yearning to make a little piece of this fantasy their own. By the time of his death in 1912, the weight of critical opinion dismissing his work as sentimental kitsch had become overwhelming, and with the ultimate ascendancy of less naturalistic styles, his work, meticulously researched and wrought, fell into obscurity.
Opinion began to change in the early 1970s, as retrospectives and new publications brought renewed attention. By 1990, a catalogue raisonné had appeared.2 Alma-Tadema’s rehabilitation is now more or less complete, taking account of his interaction with the Pre-Raphaelites, his influence on European Symbolist painters like Klimt and Khnopff, and his broader role within nineteenth-century English painting.3 As usual, the sales history tells the larger story: His major painting, The Finding of Moses, had sold for £5,250 in 1904, though by 1960 the Newman Gallery couldn’t find a buyer for it. Failing to meet its reserve, it was bought in later that year for £252.4 By November 2010, however, Moses sold at Sotheby’s in New York for a record-smashing $35,922,500.
One of the reasons for the rediscovery of Lawrence Alma-Tadema is the obsessive exactitude with which he tried to make the antique work visible. Archaeological exertion and archival digging were part of his art. And so it is that this Dutch-born artist, dismissed by Ruskin as the worst painter of the nineteenth century, enters into the story of latter-day efforts to understand the Athenians’ great architectural enigma, the Parthenon. In particular, it is his answer to a fiery question of classical scholarship—was the Parthenon painted or pure white as popularly imagined?—that matters most for our story. Sir Lawrence made his view clear with a painting from 1868 called Pheidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends (insert this page, bottom).5 It is a fantastic re-creation of the moment when the sculptor unveils his newly carved frieze to Perikles and his mistress, Aspasia. The young Alkibiades is present too, leaning against his teacher, Sokrates, the entire viewing party aloft on a wooden scaffold erected high above the Acropolis, affording them a rare “frieze-eye” view. Inspiration for this painting came, no doubt, from Alma-Tadema’s visit to the British Museum in 1862, when he first set eyes on the Elgin Marbles.
Pheidias Showing the Frieze could only have diminished Sir Lawrence’s standing among the Victorian elite. For he did not depict the frieze as it appeared piecemeal in the museum’s galleries, its white marble honey-hued with oxidation and grime. Instead, he showed the sculptures in living color: men with reddish-brown skin, draped in white mantles, standing beside horses black, white, or gray, all set against a deep blue background. When displayed in public for the first time in 1877, the painting’s “fairground colours” were cause for much dismay. Exhibited in London once again in 1882, the painting reignited debate in what might be called the polychromy wars of classical scholarship.6 We can only speculate on the inspiration for Alma-Tadema’s artistic license in coloring the Parthenon frieze as he did. Was it his honeymoon trip through Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii in 1863–1864? Had the experience of the grand Mediterranean tour with his bride, Marie-Pauline Gressin, brought heightened color and emotion to his imagined view of the Parthenon?
More likely, Alma-Tadema, a devoted student of archaeology and architectural history, had read Charles Newton’s History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae, published in 1862. In this groundbreaking volume, the archaeologist documented the vivid colors preserved on the relief sculptures of the newly discovered tomb of King Mausolos at Halikarnassos (modern Bodrum), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.7 Newton reported of the mausoleum that the “whole frieze was coloured … the ground of the relief was ultramarine, the flesh a dun red, and the drapery and armour picked out with colours.”8 And he drew inevitable comparisons with the Parthenon frieze, a monument that fell under his care as keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum. “The bridles of the horses, as on the frieze of the Parthenon, were of metal, as may be seen by an examination of the horses’ heads, several of which are pierced for the attachment of metal.” Newton adds, “This variety of colour must have greatly contributed to the distinctness and animation of the composition.”
Recognition of ancient polychromy understandably came as a shock to those who had been introduced to Greek art through plaster casts. Since the fifteenth century, the making, trading, collecting, and display of white plaster casts had played an enormous role in the shaping of European taste for the antique.9 The highly respected eighteenth-century German art historian Johann Winckelmann, despite never having set foot in Greece, became chief promulgator of the belief that ancient Greek sculpture was bright white. In Winckelmann’s aesthetic view, one deeply informed by his own homoerotic sensibilities, purity was the very essence of beauty. In his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums of 1764, he wrote, “A beautiful body will, accordingly, be the more beautiful the whiter it is.”10 The neoclassical aesthetic defined and promoted by Winckelmann made the pure whiteness of marble an enduring fetish.
Those who had traveled to the Aegean experienced a different reality. As we have seen, encountering the Parthenon frieze up close in the 1750s, James Stuart observed bits of metal preserved in the many holes drilled into the marble, and he suggested these were for the attachment of bronze fittings: spears and swords for the horsemen, bridles and reins for the horses, wreaths, and other accessories for those who march in procession. Such metal ornaments would have glistened in the raking sunlight pouring into the exterior colonnade. Stuart and his colleague Nicholas Revett also observed traces of color preserved on the Parthenon and the Theseion. In volumes 2 and 3 of The Antiquities of Athens, they published engravings showing in clear outline where paint had once enhanced the decorative moldings of these temples.11
The French architectural theorist Quatremère de Quincy announced the existence of ancient polychromy in his book Le Jupiter olympien, in 1814, a work that should have informed those who saw the Elgin Marbles in 1817, when they were first installed in a temporary gallery at the British Museum. Nonetheless, there was a persistent reluctance to accept that the Parthenon frieze had once been painted. Purity and simplicity were the aesthetic ideals of the day in Britain.12 The Parthenon, as pinnacle of Western art and taste, was seen to conform to Winckelmann’s old axiom: white is to sculpture what color is to painting.
By 1830, the French architect Jacques-Ignace Hittorff established, beyond a doubt, that Greek temples had been extensively painted with bright colors. Firsthand examination of ancient monuments during travels through Italy and Sicily yielded irrefutable evidence of pigments preserved on architectural moldings. He outlined his discoveries in a seminal paper titled “Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs.” (Hittorff would go on to present a groundbreaking study of color on the poros architecture of Selinunte, Sicily, in a book called Restitution du temple d’Empédocle à Sélinonte, published in 1851.)13
A German treatise on the topic was to follow: Franz Kugler’s Ueber die Polychromie der griechischen Architektur und Skulptur und ihre Grenzen in 1835. Lord Elgin’s former secretary, W. R. Hamilton, was asked to translate the book for the Royal Society of Literature. The translator was intrigued. He wrote straightaway to the trustees of the British Museum, urging them to form a committee to investigate whether traces of pigment might survive on the Parthenon marbles. By this time, several sets of moldings had been taken from the sculptures for the purpose of producing plaster casts, the first for Elgin himself in 1802.14 Additional moldings were taken in 1817 under the supervision of Richard Westmacott Sr., and with the new debate over ancient polychromy raging, even more ca
sts were made in 1836–1837.15
The mold maker Pietro Angelo Sarti was called from Rome to a meeting in the Elgin Room at the British Museum in December 1836. The topic for discussion was polychromy on the Parthenon sculptures.16 Sarti was asked to describe the process that had been used in preparing the marbles for casting in 1817 and in 1836. Among those gathered was the scientist Michael Faraday, who, earlier that year, had discovered electromagnetic induction. Faraday was aghast to hear how the Parthenon marbles had been prepared for molding, with a prewash of soap lyes and/or strong acid. Used repeatedly, each time a set of molds was taken, these corrosives, explained Faraday, would have “removed every vestige of colour that might have existed originally on the surface of the marble.”17 But the castings continued, at least for the moment. And Faraday’s further concerns, regarding the grime and dirt collecting on the surface of the sculptures (resulting from “the London atmosphere” of “dust, smoke, and fumes”), went largely unheeded. He advocated for dry brushing and very careful washing with a little carbonated alkali (like washing soda) rather than soap or acid.18
The grand reopening of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham nearly twenty years later would renew interest in the coloring of ancient stone. For the exhibition of 1854, the architect and design theorist Owen Jones created a multicolored Greek Court exhibiting brightly painted casts of the Elgin Marbles. Jones’s vision for the court was influenced by his firsthand experience of ancient monuments during his travels through Italy and Greece in 1842. On the Greek leg, he met the young French architect Jules Goury, who had assisted the German architectural historian Gottfried Semper in his radical studies of polychromy in ancient architecture. Jones and Goury traveled together to Cairo, Constantinople, and Granada, where they undertook a landmark study of Islamic polychrome decoration at the Alhambra palace.19
The Parthenon Enigma Page 33