Nobody tells you that the Parthenon is smaller than you expect. Not physically. It is enormous, obviously, a fact your body understands before your mind does when you finally stand at the top of the Acropolis and feel the scale of the thing pressing down on the hill around it. What is smaller is the gap between it and everything you have seen of it, whether it be the photographs, the paintings, or the textbook diagrams. You have been looking at the Parthenon your whole life without knowing it, and then you are there, and it is both exactly what you imagined and completely different, and you don’t quite know what to do with that. This is the problem with Greek art generally. We are so deep inside its influence that we can barely see it anymore.
The columns that hold up bank buildings and courthouses and every institution that wants to communicate permanence and authority are Greek. The idea that the human body is the most beautiful and significant subject an artist can choose is Greek. The notion that art should strive for an ideal rather than simply record what is in front of it is also Greek, and so thoroughly absorbed into Western thinking that it takes real effort to remember it was ever a choice, let alone a radical one.
The archaic kouroi, those early standing male figures from the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, show you the choice being made in real time. They arrive clearly influenced by Egyptian sculpture, the same frontal stance, the same rigid arms, the same one foot forward. Then, generation by generation, something loosens. The smile becomes less fixed. The weight shifts. The body starts to think about moving. By the time you reach the classical period you have Myron’s Discobolus, a figure caught in the full twist of an athletic throw, a body organized entirely around a moment of action. The Egyptians made figures for eternity, static and permanent. The Greeks wanted to catch life in the act.
What they were really after, and this took them centuries to articulate, was the idea of the perfect moment. Not this particular athlete throwing this particular discus, but the ideal of an athlete, the throw distilled to its essential form. Polykleitos wrote an entire treatise, now lost, about the mathematical relationships between body parts that would produce perfect beauty, the canon. He then made a sculpture to illustrate it, which is the most Greek thing imaginable, a philosophical argument rendered in real form. A proof you could walk around.
We have lost almost all of it, which is the other thing nobody quite prepares you for. The bronzes are almost entirely gone, melted down for weapons or lost at sea. What we have are Roman marble copies, made centuries later by craftsmen working from originals they admired but could not fully understand. The Discobolus you have seen in photographs is a copy. The Doryphoros is a copy. Much of what we think of as classical Greek sculpture is a Roman idea of classical Greek sculpture, which means we are looking at an interpretation of a golden age filtered through a civilization that was nostalgic for it.
Yet, some materials get through. The Elgin Marbles in the British Museum are original. They were carved in the 440s BCE under the supervision of Pheidias, and the quality of the carving is almost unbearable to look at up close. The horse’s muscles move under stone skin. Figures are draped in fabric so thin and complex that you understand immediately why sculptors of every subsequent century felt they were working in the shadow of something they could not reach.
The Greeks themselves knew they were doing something new. They had a word, arete, that meant excellence or virtue but also carried the sense of a thing fulfilling its highest potential. A knife with perfect arete cuts perfectly. A man with perfect arete is fully, completely himself. Their art was an attempt to show what that looked like, to make arete visible.
Whether they succeeded is almost beside the point now. The attempt shaped everything that came after it. You cannot look at a Renaissance painting, or a neoclassical facade, or a figure drawing class, or the way athletes are photographed in sports magazines without seeing the Greeks still working, still insisting that the human form matters, that beauty is a serious subject, that getting it right is worth a lifetime of effort.
The Parthenon sits on its hill above Athens, missing its roof and most of its sculpture, scaffolded for a restoration that has been ongoing for decades and may never fully finish. It is a ruin. It has been a ruin for longer than it was ever whole. And it is still, without much competition, the most influential building in the history of Western architecture.
There is something worth sitting with in that. The Greeks built for permanence and achieved something stranger and more durable. They built for influence. The ruin turns out to matter more than the intact building ever could have. We keep looking at it because it keeps looking back.
About the Author
Morgan Avery Mucha is a junior year art history student specializing in Ancient Greek art, with a focus on visual culture and material/ religious practice. She can read and write Ancient (Attic) Greek and has written for her academic blog, Art Abloom, for three years, engaging with classical art, archaeology, and historical interpretation.
Read more on the Honors Blog.
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