Born in Stone

Tucked into a dip in the plateau to avoid challenging the famed outline of the Parthenon, Athens' Acropolis Museum is an inconspicuous but memorable shrine to the great moment when European art was born. In little more than a century, Greek sculpture passed from the archaic, which was mainly imported, to the classical and home grown. The austere Greek figures of the 6th century B.C. gave way to the playful and nearly human marbles of the 5th century. This moment of new birth, perhaps the most important in art history, is newly documented as the Acropolis Museum celebrates the new year by opening three new galleries.

Archaic Greek sculpture was Near Eastern in its hieratic stiffness and austerity, putting mind over matter and awe over pleasure. It was intended not to produce an illusion of reality, but rather to lift the temple visitor into an other-worldly realm of contemplation. This conception of sculpture reigned supreme for untold centuries, until the classical Greeks traded it for a new idea of their own, which was simply to make stone seem as real as flesh and similarly beautiful.

Illusion of Truth. Classical statues impart a keen delight in the body, in health and in motion. They create--as in the lean hunting hound and the happy teenager below--uncanny illusions of physical truth. This concern for truth to nature and esthetic illusion was to become the wellspring of the Renaissance and of practically all great European art.

For four years Director John Meliades has been rearranging and patching together ancient fragments. His special prides are a 6th century Kore and the 5th century Nike (opposite), contrasting pinnacles of the Greeks' swift transition from archaic power to classical refinement.

Present fashion has partly reverted to the archaic, preferring the Kore to the Nike. To devotees of abstract art, the Kore seems the less fussy and closer to the "pure form" of modern sculptors such as Brancusi and Henry Moore. Yet the Kore's abstract balance is physical and intensely feminine too. She bulges the stone, breathing, and smiles from her cliff of self most tenderly. The Nike (Victory) has greatness of another order: she moves like a swirl of gauze and a body both, proudly displaying the lightness of spirit-filled flesh. She is the archaic maid set free.

Happy Burial. The Kore and other archaic statues were preserved by a happy chance of Greek history. In 480 B.C., invading Persians broke up the Acropolis statuary. But the Persians were defeated and turned back in Themistocles' great naval victory of Salamis. Returning, the Greeks piously buried the fragments of the sacred statuary on the Acropolis itself.

Left exposed, the statues would have weathered away; underground, the fragments survived. Discovered and dug up 70 years ago, the statues were pieced together again. A large part of the museum's work has been to reconstruct the reconstructions. Artisans before World War II used iron bars to hold the fragments together. But now the bars are rusting. So Meliades is replacing them with bronze reinforcements, an operation he calls "responsible and sometimes breathtaking."

One by one, the museum's archaic treasures take their turns on a "marble surgeon's operating table." One was reduced to 32 pieces before being pinned together again. Yet they return from the doctor's shining like life itself. "We might claim," says Meliades hopefully, "to have saved them for thousands of years more."

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