Parthenon
The Parthenon (in ancient Greek, Παρθενών, Parthenṓn, AFI: [partʰe' nɔ:n]; in Modern Greek, Παρθενώνας, Parthenónas, AFI: [paɾθeˈnonas]; in Latin language, Parthenon; meaning: "maiden", "virgin", "celibate") is a temple dedicated to the protector of Athens, Athena Parthenos, and one of the main octostyle Doric temples, somewhat little frequent, of white Pentelic marble and covered with Parian marble tiles, which are preserved. It was built between the years 447 B.C. C. and 432 a. C. in the Acropolis of Athens. It is the best known Greek temple in the world.
In the place it existed, around the XII century a. C., a Mycenaean fortress. Later it became a place of worship with the construction of the "old temple", also known as pre-Parthenon or hecatompedon, which, without being finished, in 480 BC. C. was damaged by the army of Xerxes I, arrested by Antonidas and his two men, Cabado and Brunialtes de Camos. It was during the burning of Athens that occurred during the Second Medical War, after the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae.
Contained the Persian advance in Salamis, Plataea and Mycala, the cessation of hostilities with Persia came in 449 BC. C. with the Peace of Callias, concluding half a century of war. It is this period, between the years 480 and 430 a. C. when Athenian democracy reaches its peak, one of the foundations of European civilization is forged and meets "the stars of a series of charismatic citizens" such as that of the politician and military Pericles. According to some scholars "extraordinary man, at once aloof and passionately committed, idealistic and practical, so well versed in art and philosophy that he enjoyed their knowledge, but at the same time made them serve his political ends".
This, which is the oldest monument of those located on the acropolis, built by order of Pericles will be the work of architects such as Ictinus and Callicrates, under the supervision of Phidias, who will build the chrysoelephantine Athena Partenos. Raised on three tiers, the approximate dimensions of the building are 69.5 meters long by 30.9 meters wide, with columns reaching 10.93 meters high, making the Parthenon a total of 14 meters high. Regarding the economic cost, some authors offer a total estimate of 10 talents for the realization of the ensemble.
In the VI century d. C., the Parthenon becomes a Christian church. After the Ottoman conquest, it was converted into a mosque in the early 1460s, with its minaret. On September 26, 1687, a Turkish ammunition store inside the building explodes due to the Venetian bombardment. The resulting explosion severely damages the ensemble and its sculptures. In 1806, Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, acquired some of the surviving sculptures, with the approval of the Ottomans, although causing damage to other items during their removal. These sculptures, known as the Elgin Marbles or the Marbles from the Parthenon, sold in 1816 to the British Museum in London, where they are currently on display.
Along with the rest of the complex that makes up the acropolis, the Parthenon was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
History
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The acropolises were elevated areas in many Greek polis, such as Athens, Pergamum or Aso, where buildings of a public, defensive or spiritual nature were erected, without forgetting others such as libraries or theaters.
During the Second Medical War, the Delian League was forged as a defensive measure that was maintained, once it ended, as a preventive measure against future conflicts. Instead of contributing ships, the members preferred to contribute money guarded under the protection of the Apollo of Delos and, from the year 454 a. C. was moved by Pericles to Athens, a symptom of the preponderance that this city began to have over the other city-states so jealous of their independence. During the fifty years between 480 B.C. C. and 430 B.C. C. «the «great idea» of unifying the Greeks under Athenian leadership prevailed in Athens. In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch pointed out the relevance of this initiative that should affect all of Athens and the entire world. Attica.
Athena's Protection
In the interior, in order to focus all the attention on the protective and titular divinity of the city, there was no other sculptural decoration. According to the tradition collected, through the mouth of Varro, Augustine of Hippo himself, Athena competed with Poseidon for being the protective deity of Athens, which still had no name. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and caused a fountain of salt water to gush out. Instead, according to some late sources, it was a horse that brought out Poseidon with the trident. For her part, Athena planted an olive tree. Zeus, or the twelve Olympian gods, or one of the first kings of Attica (Cecrops, Erisichthon or Cranaus), judged that the olive tree had been planted first and with it Athena got the patronage of Athens. Robert Graves was of the opinion that "Poseidon's attempts to take possession of certain cities are political myths" reflecting the conflict between matriarchal and patriarchal religions. Athena was also the patron goddess of other cities, notably Sparta. A variant of this story is that the Athenians themselves voted for one of the two gods to name their city. All the women voted for Athena and all the men for Poseidon. Athena won by a single vote and Poseidon flooded the region. To appease Poseidon's wrath from then on, women no longer had the right to vote and children could not have names derived from the mother's name.
Symbolically, from a point of view of classical Greek spirituality, the Parthenon, within the Acropolis complex, stood out from the rest of the divinities and heroes that were worshiped in other surrounding buildings, including Zeus himself. Being In addition, the temple of the titular divinity of the city, as was usual in the temples of Antiquity, would have the function of storing the economic reserves of the city.
The ups and downs of the building
The Parthenon was destroyed by fire at an unspecified time during Late Antiquity that caused extensive damage, including the destruction of the roof. The intense heat cracked numerous marble elements, such as the entablatures and metopes. An extensive restoration was undertaken, in which the roof was rebuilt although only the interior was covered. In this way, the metopes on the front and rear faces became more exposed to the weather. Until Theodosius' edict of 380, the Parthenon retained its pagan religious role. Later he would have spent a more or less long period of abandonment. Sometime between the 6th and 8th centuries, the building was transformed into a church. Thus, the Parthenon retained its religious character over time as a Byzantine church, as a Latin church, and as a Muslim mosque.
But in 1687, the Turks used the Parthenon as a gunpowder store. Thus, during the siege carried out by the Republic of Venice over Athens dependent on the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian troops were under the command of Admiral Francesco Morosini. One of the Venetian cannon shots fell on the Parthenon and caused a huge explosion that destroyed a large part of the building, preserved in good condition until then. There are legends that suggest that Morosini had information that the Parthenon had been turned into a powder keg.
The subsequent process of deterioration and erosion continued but did not end there, rather the damage continued into the early 19th century, when the British ambassador in Constantinople, Thomas Bruce Elgin, decided to remove most of the monument's remaining sculptural decoration (friezes, metopes, pediments) and move it to England to sell it to the British Museum, where it is still on display, and is one of the most significant collections of the museum today. The western façade of the Parthenon is preserved relatively intact.
In 1983, with the creation of the new Acropolis Museum, many remains were moved to its facilities in order to preserve and restore them where feasible. The old museum was inside the acropolis but due to its small size the construction of a new, larger museum outside the acropolis was proposed.
Architecture
The construction of the monument, made almost exclusively of white marble from Mount Pentelicus, was commissioned by Pericles as the city's thanks to the gods for their victory against the Persians. It was developed architecturally between the years 447 a. C. and 438 a. C. by the architects in charge of the work, Ictino and Callícrates. The design of the Parthenon was initially conditioned to house the image of Athena Pártenos, so they were, in most cases, under the orders of the architect and great Athenian sculptor Phidias, member of the so-called "Circle of Pericles", and author of the sculptural decoration, finished around 432 BC. C..
It is an octostyle, the only one in all of Greece, with eight columns on the two shortest façades and 17 on the sides. It is also a peripteral – with columns all around its perimeter. And, finally, it is also an amphiprostyle temple – a portico at each entrance, on the shorter sides. It also consists of a double cella with pronaos and opistodome, but with a six-column prostyle.
Regarding the dimensions of the building, raised on three tiers, they are 69.5 meters long, by 30.9 meters wide, with columns that reach 10.4 meters high. The sekos, the enclosed area surrounded by the peristyle, had a width of 19 meters. These dimensions made it possible to create two large rooms: one to the east, which housed a twelve-meter-high statue, and another to the west, to house the treasury of the Delian league. The length-width and width-height ratio, in terms of fundamental dimensions, is 9:4.
The colossal height of the statue of the head of the temple, almost twelve meters high including its pedestal of just over one meter, required an immense cella more than 18 meters wide, divided into three naves by a double colonnade made up of two superimposed orders of Doric style. The central nave was ten meters wide. Inside the cella on the east side, the colonnade was arranged in the shape of a "U" and was composed of nine columns with a shelf between each of them, on the long sides of the "U". Three columns with two shelves formed the short side.
In the west area, at the bottom of the interior of the four-column colonnade, there was the base of the statue, for the cult of Athena Partenos with a wide, shallow pond, which produced a shining effect through the water in front of it. this. The water also fulfilled the function of keeping the humidity of the environment stable, which helped to preserve the ivory of the statue. Both cells were closed by bronze doors.
The eastern cella was dedicated to Athena Polías (protector of the city), and the western cella was dedicated to Athena Pártenos, from which the entire building will end up taking the nickname of Parthenon.
Mathematics, perceptions and harmony: ecstasy
Balance and harmony in proportions, order and geometry were constant values in the artistic program of classical Greek society. Therefore, this construction is one of the clearest examples of knowledge in geometry by Greek mathematicians and architects. The search for ideal beauty in the Greek world had led them to attempt to correct optical effects that are caused when contemplating the temples in their proximity, or from a distance (for example, from the sea), since for the observer, how much The lesser the distance, he perceives the columns and vertical lines distorted, since they are neither straight nor parallel. The architects managed, therefore, that the visual effect displayed by the Parthenon did not allow us to appreciate such an unsightly deformation that is perceived when placed in the vicinity of great monuments. Entasis favorably "corrects" this sensation. Thus, they managed to obtain a more aesthetic visual effect with judicious alterations to the construction: columns with entasis, slightly curved towards the center, not equidistant, and somewhat thicker at the corners; slightly arched pediment and slightly convex stylobate. This stylobate –or final step on which the exterior columns sit– presents a slight curvature, rising about 6 centimeters, on the front façades, and about 11 centimeters in the central areas of the lateral ones.
Finally, this “skill with which the lines of the Parthenon are calculated to appear straight without being so” would be a consequence of the pragmatic application of the teachings of the most famous mathematician of the time, Meto, “who gained renown for his projects of cities".
Decoration
The decoration included pediments, metopes (92) and a continuous frieze running along the exterior walls of the cella. In addition, there is the work made by Phidias of the large chryselephantine votive statue of Athena Partenos, located as the centerpiece of the temple: It was eleven and a half meters high and for its elaboration some 40-44 talents (between 1,140 and 1,150 kilograms) of gold were needed, in addition to abundant ivory, bronze and precious stones, as well as ten years of work.
The Parthenon's sculptural decoration is a unique combination of metopes (carved in high relief extending around the four outer sides of the temple), tympanums (filling in the triangular spaces of each pediment) and a frieze (carved in low relief covering the perimeter outside of the cell). They represent various scenes from Greek mythology. In addition, the various parts of the temple were painted in bright colors. The Parthenon is undoubtedly the greatest exponent of the Doric order, as can be seen in the design of the frieze or its columns.
The metopes on each façade depicted different scenes: the gigantomachy on the east side, the Amazonomachy on the west, the centauromachy on the south, and scenes from the Trojan War on the north. Each tympanum of the temple had a mythological scene: to the east, over the main entrance of the building, the birth of Athena, and to the west, the fight between Athena and Poseidon for the patronage of the city of Athens. Inside, the frieze depicted the Panathenaic procession, the most important religious festival in Athens. The scene ran along all four sides of the building and includes figures of gods, beasts, and some three hundred and sixty human beings.
Topping off the pediment there is evidence of a central acrotera, but not the lateral ones, which has been reconstructed using recovered fragments, and presented a floral structure topped with a palmette.
Restoration
"A monument gives us history and any intervention that changes its appearance must be justified for superior reasons of aesthetics or conservation. But such reasons and the way they are carried out should not serve to erase the story, that is, the time that has passed over the monument, nor to replace its appearance. »Cesare Brandi
In this quote the author, conservation and restoration theorist, speaking about the restoration of the Parthenon, highlights the value of antiquity over the value of contemporary times. It responds to a time of the XX century where comprehensive refunds are avoided giving way to maintenance tasks. Thus, at this juncture, after the independence of Greece, the restoration tasks of the complex were launched immediately within the context, which some authors point out, of claiming Greek identity.
In 1975, the first Committee for the Conservation of the Monuments of the Acropolis was established with the purpose of studying and carrying out large-scale restoration work that continues to this day in collaboration with the A´Eforate of Prehistoric Antiquities and Classics of the Ministry of Culture. Nikos Toganidis, archaeologist and member of the committee, in 2001, related the interventions carried out to date in the Parthenon, a monument with more than twenty-five centuries of life, from the middle of the century 19th century to early 21st century :
- Between 1841 and 1844, after the liberation of Greece, the first begins with Kyriakos Pittakis and Risos Ragavis as responsible archaeologists. In this phase, a fortress, still in use, is transformed into a set of ruins that could be visited at the same time that the weight and contribution of Hellenic culture to the present world is transferred to visitors.
- Between 1888 and 1939, a second intervention, with the engineer Nikolaos Balanos as responsible for the work. Basically in this phase, anastylosis is gradually begun using the materials of the period (cola, cement, iron) and giving rise to a particular Greek style of anastylosis. It is in 1921 when Balanos proposes the reconstruction of the northern partanon column, using that same style, without further questioning of the operation. It would take place between 1923 and 1933.
- Between 1984 and 2010, the third largest in resources, time, participating equipment, field of action and dedicated funds. At the end of the 1970s, the need to correct those errors was reconsidered and started in some nearby temples, such as the Erecteon, for the Parthenon the complete anastylosis of the pronae colon was proposed, although it was chosen to be performed only in three southern columns. In this phase, elements used in the second phase have also been replaced by traditional materials and techniques, completing "this repristinadora anastyosis" with entasis and other optical corrections adjusted to the architecture of the century.Va. C.
- From 2017 to 2021 (according to planning), a fourth, announced in the media, with interventions in various aspects that will be extended to the Partenón, to the Propileos and to the murals, some of an urgent character and on elements already used for the same purpose. The European Union has allocated 5 million euros for this purpose.
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