A Symbol of Democracy and Classical Art: the Parthenon

It is a readily recognizable icon that every schoolchild knows - the Parthenon.  It is the most important surviving example of classical Greek art and an icon for Athenian democracy.  Built on the Acropolis, the seat of the Delian league, in the mid-5th century BCE, it was then and still is considered the finest example of a Doric temple ever built.

It's said that the Greeks have a word for it, but where the word "parthenon" came from is debatable.  The word "parthénos" has an unclear etymology.  It means a maiden or girl, but also means a virgin or unmarried woman.  It was applied to Athena and Artemis, maiden goddesses.  "Virgin" seems to be the reference, as "parthenoi" are the virgins who safeguard the city.  The parthenon may have been a room in the temple, which one is unknown, that were the "virgin's apartments", and may have referred to a room where a peplos, a garment, was woven and given to Athena by the Arrephoros, young girls who served in the cult of Athena.

Block V (fragment) from the east frieze of the Parthenon, circa 447-433 BCE.
This shows a new peplos being brought for Athena.  This is one of the so-called
"Elgin" marbles in the British Museum.  Click here to see their take on them.

Originally it was the home of a massive chryselephantine sculpture of Athena made by Phidias, called "Athena Parthenos".  It was the most famous cult image, and was the masterpiece of the most acclaimed sculptor in ancient Greece.  There have been a number of replicas, which is how we know about it, for the original has been lost.  Begun about 447 BCE, the gold sheets which covered it were removed in 296 BCE and were replaced by gilded bronze plates.  In 165 BCE it was damaged by fire, but repaired.  It remained in the Parthenon until the 5th century CE, and was mentioned in an account in the 10th century CE in Constantinople, where it was taken, but may have been destroyed in another fire.

The Varvakeion Athena, a Roman copy made of marble in the 2nd
century CE, is considered to be most faithful to the original.  Her
garment is belted by a pair of serpents, a winged Nike stands on her
right hand, and a sphinx in the center of her headdress. 

The Parthenon is no stranger to damage and destruction.  The first attempt to build a temple for Athena Parthenos was just after the battle of Marathon in 490-488 BCE.  It was replaced by a larger temple which was still being built when the Acropolis was destroyed by the Persians in 480 BCE.  During the "golden age" of Pericles the Acropolis was the site of an important project which included the Parthenon.  Under the general supervision of Phidias, architects Kallikrates and Iktinos began work in 447 BCE and completed it by 432 BCE.  Some of the decorations took another year to complete.

An engraving from A. Rosengarten, 1898,
A Handbook of Architectural Styles, NY.

The platform it is built on, or stylobate, is where the pillars stand, and has a slight parabolic curvature upward to reinforce the structure and deflect rain.  The columns lean inwards slightly, and if they were extended they would meet about a mile above the center of the structure.  There is a slight bulge to the columns, known as entasis, which was used since the pyramids in Egypt and even during the Renaissance.  Although some studies claim that its proportions approximate the golden ratio, recent studies claim otherwise.

The Parthenon was a treasury, used to store the votive offerings to the gods, of the Delian League which was moved from Delos once the Parthenon was completed. Consistent with a treasury building, there were a series of marble panels, metopes, on the outside walls.  Each side had a different subject.  Some have been destroyed, primarily from a cannonball in 1687 during a Venetian attack; fifteen from the southern wall were removed and are part of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum.

A centaur and a lapith fighting.  From the southern wall, currently in London.

The southern wall showed the Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs.  The Lapiths were a legendary people from Thessaly in Greek mythology.  At a wedding feast where the centaurs were not invited, they crashed the scene and tried raping the women.  The centaurs were kicked out and expelled from Thessaly.  What is known of the missing metopes is from drawings done in 1674, and their subject matter is not clear.  In March this year five metopes were discovered in the southern wall of the Acropolis.  They were most likely placed there in efforts to repair and extend the wall when the Acropolis was used as a fortress in the 18th century.

Another metope from the southern wall, also in the British Museum.

The eastern metopes were over the main entrance, and show the battle between the Olympian gods and the giants.  They are in poor condition, and identification of the figures is guesswork.

The eastern metopes.

The northern metopes show scenes from the Trojan War.  The western metopes depict the invasion of Athens by Amazons, however, because of the Amazons in eastern clothing, scholars consider them to really be about the Persian wars.

The western metopes.

The Parthenon frieze is a relief sculpture of marble that was on the Parthenon's exterior walls, carved in situ circa 440 BCE.  Again there is argument here whether it depicts the Panathenaic procession or the sacrifice of Pandora.  Making up the majority of the "Elgin marbles", most of it is in the British Museum.

The British Museum's display of most of the Parthenon frieze.

Although the Parthenon was originally a temple, this is not in the conventional sense.  There was a small shrine in the structure, the statue of Athena, and a treasury.  It served as a temple to Athena until the 5th century CE, when it was converted to a Christian church.  It became an important pilgrimage site in Byzantine times, where it was known as the Church of the Parthenos Maria (Virgin Mary).  During the Latin Empire (1204 - 1261) it became a Roman Catholic church.  The conversion from temple to church involved removing much of the interior and creating an apse, and led to the removal and possible destruction of some of the sculptures.

Southern side of the Parthenon.

When Athens fell to the Ottomans in 1456, part of the Parthenon was made into a mosque and a minaret was added.  Although the Ottomans remained respectful of monuments in their acquired territories, they did not make any efforts to preserve them.  It was under their auspices that the Parthenon was almost destroyed.  In September of 1687 a band of Venetians surrounded the Acropolis and fired cannonballs at it and the Turks within.  The worst damage occurred when a cannonball hit the stores of gunpowder inside.  In the looting that followed, sculptures and pieces of them were taken.

Fragment of a shell believed to be from the Venetians in the
(you guessed it!) British Museum.

In the 18th century there arose a group of archaeologists and travelers who succumbed to philhellenism -  the love of Greek culture.  Efforts were made to survey the ruins of classical Athens, and in 1801 the British ambassador to Constantinople, the Earl of Elgin, obtained written permission from the Sultan to study and make casts of the antiquities of the Acropolis; demolish recent construction; and remove sculptures from them.  This is spurious, as the document is nonexistent.  He detached sculptures from the buildings, and bought some from local denizens.  Some of the sculptures were sawn in half to make their transport to England easier.

Sculptures from the east pediment, thought to be Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite.
Currently in the British Museum.

According to the British Museum's website (see link above), Lord Elgin's actions were examined by Parliament and found to be legal, and the sculptures taken were acquired by the Museum in 1816.  Negotiations by the Greek government for the return of these Greek treasures has been going on since 1983, to no avail.

Although the Parthenon will never be restored to its original glory, efforts are being made by the Greek government to restore both its structural and aesthetic integrity.  Archaeologists and architects work with modern equipment and computers to determine original states as much as possible.  Earlier reconstruction efforts that were incorrect are being dismantled, as are some of the methods used, such as using iron pins which have caused erosion.  Newer metal work is being done with titanium.

Even in its decline and its state of damage, the beauty overwhelms, especially in person.  A testament to the artistic genius of 2,500 years ago, the Parthenon still stands as evidence of one of the best achievements of humankind.

***************

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

*******************************

Entartete Kunst

Our patience with all those who have not been able to fall in line
 is at 

an end.  What you are seeing here are the crippled products 
of 

madness, impertinence, and lack of talent.  I would need
 several 

freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish.  
This will happen soon.

Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reichkulturkammer, 1937

Among the many things the Nazis burned was art.  In their attempts to forge a new national identity that reflected their Aryan purity was the effort to control artistic expression and that meant anything contemporary was not sanctioned. Furthermore all this art was exhibited in ways that were intended to denigrate and villify it and also to associate it with the Jewish race and communists, to underscore what they claimed was the negative impact both had on "proper" society.

"Entartete kunst" in German means "degenerate art" - art that was debauched, of low value, contemptible, despicable, shameful - you get it.  The term actually came from a book from 1892 by Max Nordau, a social critic, entitled Entartung.  In his opus, which consists of five books, Nordau identified "a contempt for the traditional views of custom and morality", and sees society imitating what they see in art, which he then goes on to diagnosis as an illness - degeneration and hysteria which points to neurasthenia, a type of mental disorder.  Entartung was not his original concept, but one that had originated in German-speaking countries during the 19th century, and was even made legitimate by a pseudo-scientific branch of medicine called "psycho-physiognomy", thus entartung was accepted as a serious medical term.  Not until Freud and psychoanalysis was this idea challenged.  To be fair, however, Mordau also condemned anti-Semitism, which was growing at the time, as a product of entartung.  This is a significant fact, because Mordau was a Jew.

Max Nordau
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Born Simcha Südfeld in Budapest, he was the son of a Hebrew poet.  He earned a medical degree, then moved to Berlin and changed his name.  He moved again to Paris as a newspaper correspondent and spent most of his life there.  His reaction to the Dreyfus affair - a French Jew named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of sharing military secrets and then proof of his innocence was suppressed by the military - drove Nordau to Zionism.  He became co-founder of the World Zionist Organization and held executive positions at several Zionist congresses.  But his ideas were influenced by another Jew, Cesare Lombroso.  In The Criminal Man, published in 1876, Lombroso maintained that some people were born criminals whose ability to deviate from social norms could be predicted by abnormal physical characteristics which confirmed them as atavistic.

Cesare Lombroso

Thus the idea of entartung was a growing and prevalent European concept that the Nazis twisted and seized to use as a tool to enforce their goal of purifying culture, albeit from concepts generated by Jews who could never have foreseen the damage that would be done.  I'm sure the irony of this escaped the Nazis.

Adding further fuel to the fire of Nazi concepts of art and race was Paul Schultze-Naumburg, a well-known painter and architect at the turn of the century.  He was part of the group of artists that formed the Jugenstil and Arts and Crafts movements in Munich.  He wrote a nine-volume series of books on art - the Kulturarbeiten, or "Works of Culture", published in 1900-1917.  This series was very popular and established him as a cultural guru of the time.  He went on to become a prominent architect.  After WWI, he became regressive and began to write condemning treatises on modern art and architecture using racial terms, such as Die Kunst de Deutschen.  Ihr Wesen und ihre Werke, "The Art of the Germans. Their Nature and Factories" (1934), and Kunst und Rasse, "Art and Race" (1928).  Schultze-Naumburg  posited that only "racially pure" artists could produce true art, like that of classical Greece and the Middle Ages, while racially mixed modern artists produced inferior art.  The Nazis held that classical art was the true ancestor of Aryan art.

In 1933, the Reichskulturkammer, or Reich Culture Chamber, was established under Josef Goebbels.  This was divided into sub-chambers for each form of artistic expression:  art, music, film, architecture, etc.  Only "racially pure" artists were allowed to create works, and membership was open to only those who met the entrance condition of works which met the Nazi standards, which included no experimentation of style. In June of 1937, Adolph Ziegler, head of the Reich Chamber of Visual Art, created a six-man commission authorized to confiscate any extant art from the various purgings from any museum or collection within the Reich.  These works were to be featured in a massive art exhibit intended to reveal to the public the revulsion of "Jewish spirit" and garner their support of Aryan supremacy.

There were many defamatory exhibits of "degenerate art", but the culmination was one that opened in Munich in July of 1937, and was touted as the exhibit of "cultural documents of the decadent work of Bolsheviks and Jews."  The Entarte Kunst exhibit was held on the second floor of what was once the Institute of Archaeology.  The layout of the exhibit was such that patrons would be in cramped rooms with the art displayed erratically, some unframed, and all hanging by cords.  There was graffiti on the walls, and slogans that were prejudicial and jeering.  Paintings by psychotic patients were also displayed to mock the art. The first room held works deemed to be anti-religious; the second room contained works by Jews; and the third held works considered to be disrespectful of soldiers, women, and farmers, or in other words, the German people.  The rest of the exhibit was helter-skelter with no perceived scheme.  Most of the pieces were identified as Jewish-Bolshevist, however of the over 100 artists whose works were included, only six were actually Jewish.  Prices were hung by each work with inflated amounts that were supposedly what the museums and collections they were from had paid.

Hitler and Goebbels at the Entartete Kunst exhibit,.

Some of the so-called degenerate art was traded at first, for pieces across Nazi-occupied Europe that exemplified the new German art.  Eventually the Nazis just began looting museums and private collections, and taking whatever they wanted. There is a current database for art stolen from Jews in German-occupied France and parts of Belgium.  There is also a registry for looted cultural property from 1933-1945.  On March 20, 1939, at a fire station in Berlin, over 1,000 paintings and almost 4,000 drawings and watercolors were burned.

The "degenerate" self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh is auctioned in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Proceeds of this 1939 auction financed the Nazi Party.

Perhaps because Germany had become the center of avant-garde development - think Bauhaus, Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang - the German public supported the return to tradition (think "family values"), which made it easy for Nazi imposition of this cultural cleansing.  Although this post focuses on fine arts, all aspects of culture were affected, even philosophy, critical theory, and many fields of academia.  Ultimately, the Nazis' attempt to end the progression of modern art, and modern life, was in vain.  But it was very costly in so many ways.

*******************************