The Parthenon Enigma (56 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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Additional moldings were taken in 1817 under the supervision of Richard Westmacott Sr., and with the new debate over ancient polychromy raging, even more casts were made in 1836–1837.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Owen Jones’s exhibit prompted a debate on polychromy at the
Royal Institute of British Architects, and he followed up with a paper, “An
Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court,” published in the institute’s
Transactions
for 1854. It was no apology for the truth: he presented substantial evidence for his use of color, including Hellenistic terra-cotta figurines in the Louvre, as well as stone fragments from Selinunte shown to him by
Jacques-Ignace Hittorff himself. He also pointed to excavations on the Athenian Acropolis in the winter of 1835–1836, when a trench 25 feet (roughly 7.5 meters) deep at the southeast corner of the Parthenon had yielded fragments of marble female torsos preserving “the brightest red, blue, yellow, or rather, vermillion, ultramarine, and straw color.” Jones declared with unwavering confidence, “To what extent were white marble temples painted and ornamented?…I would maintain that they were entirely so.”
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Popular taste for the whiteness of ancient sculpture was now fully under siege. Publishing in the same volume of the institute’s
Transactions
, the philosopher and critic
G. H. Lewes nicely summarized the prevailing opinion of the day: “The idea of the Greeks having painted their statues is so repugnant to all our modern prejudgments … that to accuse them of having
painted statues
, is to accuse them of committing what in our day is regarded as pure ‘barbarism.’ ” Yet, as Lewes conceded, “However startling, the fact remains: the Greeks
did
paint their statues. Living eyes have seen the paint.”
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The fact of paint was too much for most Victorians to bear. They had never liked even the tawny tint that clung to the surface of the sculptures. While aversion to the swarthiness of the stone has never been explicitly ascribed to
racism, one does get the sense that such a bias, so prominent in the age of empire, might account for a measure of the vehemence of the insistence upon a pure-white past. Some individuals displayed an almost obsessive compulsion to have the marbles scrubbed “clean.” Debate over whether the honey tones were natural or man-made preoccupied British commentators for decades, some proposing that
Pentelic marble contained a higher concentration of iron than other varieties and thus suffered a greater degree of oxidation over time. An apostle of this view,
Charles Cockerell, called the surface patina “nature’s polychromy.”
F. C. Penrose, on the other hand, argued that the Parthenon’s starkness was intentionally toned down with a thin, transparent wash of ocher, or some other substance, applied in antiquity.
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In 1858, Richard Westmacott Jr., principal restorer of the museum’s sculptures, won approval from the
British Museum trustees to thoroughly
clean the Elgin Marbles using
fuller’s earth, a gritty clay abrasive widely employed for the removal of oil and grime. Public outcry ensued in a series of angry letters published in
The Times
.
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Despite Westmacott’s vigorous scrubbing, the marbles seem to have become dirty again within ten years. The keeper
Charles Newton drew attention to dark stains on the walls and ceilings of the British Museum galleries and then pointed to the “black, greasy substance” deposited on the Parthenon sculptures themselves. He bitterly complained about the “foulness of the atmosphere” in the exhibition space, something he attributed to the “pouring of streams of hot air into imperfectly ventilated rooms,” as well as to the miserable air quality in Victorian London. Newton urged that the Parthenon marbles be washed with water every five years or, better yet, put under glass.
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By October 1873, his concerns had been heard, and the Parthenon frieze was protected behind a glass casing that remained in place until the 1930s, when a glorious new gallery was built for the marbles.
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In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Parthenon sculptures were regularly cleaned with hard brushes and water. But in the early 1930s the museum’s chief scientist, Dr.
H. J. Plenderleith, prescribed a new method for cleaning, one that used a “neutral solution of medicinal soft soap and ammonia,” together with distilled water.
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This procedure was followed for four years, after which everything changed.

In 1931, an enormous donation was promised to the museum for the construction of a grand new gallery to house the Elgin Marbles. The benefactor was the hugely well-connected and ever-scheming art dealer
Joseph Duveen, who had made a fortune turning his father’s import business into a house of art and antiques. Duveen had a particular talent for matching works of art owned by declining European aristocrats with the wallets of socially rising American millionaires. He formed a mutually rewarding partnership with the renowned art historian
Bernard Berenson, in which the connoisseur and the showman provided clients with attributions and advisory services. This collaboration allowed the two friends, both men of humble beginnings, to enjoy a posh lifestyle to which they could formerly only aspire.

Duveen took a very personal interest in the preparation of the galleries that bear his name to this day (
this page
, bottom). When choosing fabrics for the wall coverings of his new exhibition space, Duveen expressed a keen interest in “the actual colours of the marbles.”
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When announcing his gift to the British Museum trustees, he emphasized the necessity of removing every trace of dirt and grime from the sculptures. The board member
Lord Crawford noted in his diary that the trustees “listened patiently” as the dealer “lectured and harangued us, and talked the most hopeless nonsense about cleaning old works of art.” Duveen had expressed in no uncertain terms that “all old marbles should be thoroughly cleaned—so thoroughly that he would dip them into acid,” Crawford writes.
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As an arriviste, Duveen might have harbored a natural impulse to prettify the past. Indeed, as an art dealer, he was known to have stripped, repainted, and varnished canvases to make them more attractive for the market. Lord Crawford asserted that Duveen had “destroyed more old masters by over-cleaning than anybody else in the world.”