FRAGMENTS FROM PARTHENON SCATTERED IN MANY LANDS.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 373, 15 March 1932, Page 6

FRAGMENTS FROM PARTHENON SCATTERED IN MANY LANDS.

To-day’s Special Article

Recent Researches have Resulted in Valuable Additional Discoveries.

'(Special to the “ Star.”) LONDON, January 28. Few people realise how scattered are the fragments of the sculptures of the Parthenon. In Paris are fragments of the frieze and even one almost complete slab. One piece of the frieze is in Palermo, another in Vienna, and broken fragments have even been recovered from the rockeries of English country house gardens, whither they had gone after being brought to England by some traveller of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century.

£»UT THE BULK of the Parthenon marbles that are not in London are, of course, in Athens. There are the portions still left in situ both of the pedimental sculptures and of the frieze and metopes, and there also, in the museums, are the smaller fragments, heads from the frieze and metopes, portions from the pediments, and other pieces which have been discovered from time to time among the debris on the Acropolis itself or else during the course of excavations. A surprising addition has recently been made to the most important sculptures of the temple in the shape of a very large portion—more than half, in fact—6f a seated figure from the west pediment. It was actually found at least forty years ago, exactly how and when is not certain, and was placed in the courtyard of the Acropolis Museum among other rather damaged and unidentified antiquities. There it has remained for every archaeologist to look at. Yet, curiously enough, virtually none has ever paid the smallest attention to it until last year, when Professor Rhys Carpenter, after a close examination, came to the conclusion that it could be nothing else than one of the missing figures from the west pediment. His conclusion —which at once brings into the front rank what had always been thought to be only a battered relic of the Roman period —is based on the following facts. The Evidence. First, the surface condition of the undamaged parts show’s the undisputable technique of the Parthenon sculptures with precisely that sort of dull Surface which characterises them. Secondly, the structure and arrangement of the drapery are exactly that of the seated female figure of the Parthenon. Thirdly, the scale and size of the figure show that it fits in exactly to a gap in the pedimental group of the west side, w’here early drawings of the sculptures show a seated female torso of this very type. Both in Carrey’s famous series of drawings made in 1674 and in the other series, believed to be unconnected with Qarrey’s drawings and known as the drawings of “ Nointel’s Anonymous,” a seated figure is shown in the attitude of our ire _ment, but with some remains of the body above the w’aist, yet lacking arms and head. The dimensions of the base of the new r fragment, furthermore, seem to fit into the place on the floor of the pediment wdiere the missing figure stood originally. In short, all the convergent lines of evidence point to the same conclusion. But the most cogent argument is perhaps that from style and surface, without which the other arguments would not avail. The argument from size and scale is important since from that it is clear that our fragment could not have stood at any other place on the pediment except that where the drawings indicate the presence of a seated female figure. But even a Roman fragment might fulfil that condition, and the argument from technical and surface detail, w’hich makes it certain that the fragment is of the fifth century, gives a

force to the argument from size that is insuperable. “Figure U.” The figure on the pediment in the drawings cannot be identified with any known mythological character and passes under the alphabetical nomenclature usually applied to the unidentified figures. She is known as “ Figure U,” and the new fragment must consequently be identified with that figure. So little remains of the Parthenon pediments compared with, say, the perimental sculptures of Olympia or xEgina that any fragment, however small, of the pediments must be of the greatest importance. Here we have not a paltry leg or arm but the w’hole of a seated figure from the waist down. It merely turned up in the rubbish of the Acropolis, found probably on the spot w’here it had fallen, and was put aside as too damaged for identification. That its ultimate assignment to date and place should have taken over forty years is astonishing. It suggests that archaeologists are not always so observant as they would have us believe! But this is perhaps explained on the ground that discoveries of well-preserved statues in Athens have in recent years been of such frequent occurence that archaeologists have been seduced into tackling the more superficially attractive problems. Treasures in the Vatican. This is not the only new addition to the Parthenon sculptures. Some little time ago Professor Amelung, at Rome, was given permission to ransack the cellars of the Vatican Museum. In these cellars were all the fragments, mostly accumulated in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, from the ruins of Rome and acquired during the rebuilding from time to time of parts of the city, w’hich had not interested the curators of the museum in earlier days. This was indeed fortunate, since what they did not want to put into the museum they did not attempt to restore. The fragments in the cellars are in consequence the more damaged and unattractive fragments. But among them Amelung found two fine Parthenon sculptures. These have only just been published, since the recent death of the Professor retarded the publication of much that he had found. The fragments are a male head from one of the metopes of the south side and the head of a boy from the north side of the frieze. Both are in tolerable preservation, the former a splendid example of the more severe and early style of the metopes and the latter a typical head of the frieze, as good as any extant. How these pieces reached Rome is quite unknown. It seems probable that Roman tourists bought or took fragments that w’ere lying on the ground in their day, just as the tourists of the eighteenth century did, but it may also be that larger portions of the sculptures were removed in Roman times and subsequently reduced to fragments in Rome by the same agencies that damaged most sculpture.