Using specially developed laser technology,
conservators at the Acropolis Museum stripped centuries of grime from the
Caryatids statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece.
Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times
Acropolis Maidens Glow Anew
By LIZ ALDERMAN
ATHENS — For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood
unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fires of war blazed around them, bullets
nicked their robes, and bombs scarred their curvaceous bodies. When one of them
was kidnapped in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be
heard weeping in the night.
But only recently have the famed Caryatid
statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece, had a chance to reveal their
full glory.
For three and a half years, conservators at the
Acropolis Museum have been cleaning the maidens, Ionic columns in female form
believed to have been sculpted by Alkamenes, a student of ancient Greece’s
greatest artist, Phidias. Their initial function was to prop up a part of the
Erechtheion, the sacred temple near the Parthenon that paid homage to the first
kings of Athens and the Greek gods Athena and Poseidon.
Today they are star attractions in the museum;
the originals outside were replaced with reproductions in 1979 to keep the real
maidens safe.
Over the centuries, a coat of black grime came
to mask their beauty. Now conservators have restored them to their original
ivory glow, using a specially developed laser technology.
To coincide with the museum’s fifth
anniversary, the women — minus one — went on full display in June, gleaming
from their modern makeover. The missing Caryatid is installed at the British
Museum in London, which acquired it nearly a century ago after Lord Elgin, the
British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had it sawed off the Erechtheion’s porch,
along with shiploads of adornments from the Parthenon to decorate his mansion
in Scotland before selling the pieces to pay debts.
Greek and British authorities have long fought
over the return of these so-called Elgin marbles, a dispute that heated up
again recently when the actors George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bill Murray came
out in support of the sculptures’ being returned home during an appearance in
London for the movie “The Monuments Men.” That ignited a firestorm in Britain,
which maintains that Lord Elgin saved the marbles from destruction, and
acquired them fairly.
“Someone needs to restore George Clooney’s
marbles,” London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, retorted. The controversy may flare
anew as the British Museum plans an exhibit of the human body in Greek
sculpture for next spring, using some of the marbles from the Parthenon.
Greeks have not been shy about using the
Caryatid restoration to help press their case. While the Caryatids’ restoration
is not part of a specific campaign to get the marbles back, the fresh cleaning
shows that the museum can support their return, said Dimitris Pantermalis, the
president of the Acropolis Museum.
“We insist on a solution” to the Elgin marbles,
Mr. Pantermalis said. “A country must be ready when it claims something, and
the Acropolis Museum has completed this.”
In the meantime, the missing Caryatid is
glaring in its absence from the platform, a subversive display of resistance
that is reflected one floor up in the museum, where large swaths of the
Acropolis frieze owned by the British Museum are represented as chalky plaster
copies of the originals. On a recent weekday, Mr. Pantermalis wove through
crowds who stood enthralled around a special dais on which the five remaining
Caryatids were displayed. “With the pollution erased, we can read more about
the history of the last 2,500 years,” he said.
Knots of people were glued to a video screen
showing footage of the cleaning project, which was set up on the floor of the
museum. Conservators wearing dark goggles wielded a dual-wavelength laser
developed by the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas in Crete, a
system that was also employed to restore the Parthenon’s west frieze and the
high-relief metopes that adorned the east entrance. Beams of infrared and
ultraviolet radiation pulsed across the hem of one Caryatid’s robes, burning
soot millimeter by millimeter to reveal the apricot-tinted patina of the
original marble.
Starting in 2011, a team of six Greek
conservators focused on one Caryatid at a time, setting up fabric rooms around
each statue and mapping its surface before attacking an ebony mantle of
pollution that had thickened when Athens became a modern metropolis filled with
car exhaust, factory fumes and acid rain. Along the way, the conservators found
traces of an enormous fire set in the first century B.C. by the Roman general
Sulla, and chunks of marble from clumsy repair jobs attempted centuries ago.
It took six to eight months to transform each
statue from night into day, with the crews rotating shifts to avoid fatigue.
The in-house restoration costs were minimal and funded with income from ticket
and museum shop sales, said Costas Vassiliadis, a conservator who heads the
restoration team.
“It looked almost like tattoo removal,” said
Shawn Hocker, a tourist who had traveled to the Acropolis with his wife and
friends from Wilmington, N.C. “You can imagine what they looked like in the
ancient world.”
The museum plans to clean a number of other
architectural sculptures from the Acropolis, using the laser technology, Mr.
Vassiliadis said, although he declined to give details because the new projects
had not yet been announced.
In their original setting, the Caryatids stood
on the porch of the Erechtheion, with a sweeping southern view toward the
Aegean Sea. They rested in contrapposto poses, three of them standing firmly on
their right legs, demurely bending their left knees beneath diaphanous robes.
The others stood in opposite pose. Together they held up a part of the temple’s
massive roof.
The Caryatids’ origins were less poetic:
According to one legend, Mr. Pantermalis said, the statuesque maidens were not
intended to be glorified, but condemned to stand in penance at the temple for
eternity to atone for an ancient treachery committed by their hometown, Caryae,
a Greek city near Sparta that took the side of the Persians against the Greeks
during the Peloponnesian War. Other historians say young women from the city
who danced for the goddess Artemis were inspirations. The statues remained
nameless, and even today they go simply by the letters A, B, C, D, E and F, Mr.
Vassiliadis said.
Under the Ottoman Empire, the Erechtheion was
converted into a harem, an indignity that the Caryatids survived. Soon after,
in 1687, they were nicked by bullets and debris when the Parthenon was shelled
during a battle between the Turks and the Venetians.
But officials say the modern equivalent of that
destruction is the gaping hole that was left when Lord Elgin made off with the
statue.
Mr. Pantermalis glanced out the window toward
the Parthenon, leaning into the sky from the soaring rock of the Acropolis.
“It’s been 200 years,” he said, returning his gaze to the Caryatids. “We think
in the framework of the new museum, it’s possible to reunite our treasures.”
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