Parthenon Marbles: A Veiled Reproach from the New Acropolis Museum

Marbles Moving Day Approaches

The creators of the New Acropolis Museum, now finishing construction in Athens, have always said that they would leave empty gaps in their installation of the Greek-owned blocks from the Parthenon frieze, in the hope that Great Britain would eventually fill those voids by sending the slabs from the frieze that are now in the British Museum.

But during a recent slide presentation in New York---showing the current appearance of the new museum, as well as renderings of what it will look like when it opens (possibly in late 2008)---Dimitris Pandermalis, president of the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, revealed a new approach to the problem of the missing marbles. Instead of an empty space, the slide showed an image of one of the Greek-owned marbles chockablock with a copy of the British-owned slab that would have originally been beside it on the façade of the Parthenon. Together, they completed the relief of a horse. So that there would be no confusion between the original and the copy, the latter was veiled by a scrim, making it appear like a "ghost," as Pandermalis put it.

Pandermalis said that he felt encouraged by some recent discussions with the British about the marbles, and Bernard Tschumi, architect for the new museum, said that he is "convinced that those veiled marbles will create a public understanding of the necessity of completing the narrative....I've always thought that it might change the mind of the British Museum."

In the unlikely event that this happens, the continuous procession that the frieze was meant to depict will still have some gaps, because some parts of it were lost in various upheavals, including the conversion of the temple into a church in about 450 A.D. and a direct hit by a shell during a Venetian siege in 1687, when the structure was used by the Turks for military purposes. In the new installation, those gaps will be used as points of entry into the space.

The Greek-owned marbles, which had weathered badly over the years, have all been cleaned using lasers, Pandermalis said. They are about to be hoisted down from the Acropolis to the new museum, by a crane relay. The photo, above, shows a trial run, using a copy of one of the blocks.