Emerging from stone figures to life in Parthenon reenactment
by Susan Griffin
God-like figures that grace Athens’ ancient Greek Parthenon came to life Friday, April 22, at 1 p.m. Students in Jenifer Neils’ art history seminar at Case Western Reserve University will reenact roles of 12 Olympian gods depicted on the east side of the Parthenon and visually solve a design puzzle that has challenged art historians for centuries.
Dressed in ethereal white and carrying golden symbols of the gods, students will be videotaped as part of the educational project that involved researching and writing about their individual gods and then acting out their character roles. The reenactment takes place on the south portico of the Cleveland Museum of Art before its Greco-Roman façade.
“This reenactment will prove once and for all how effective the artist’s design was,” Neils said.
Ten students from the seminar along with two other art history majors are the acting corps as well as the production crew. They had assistance from professors in theater (Catherine Albers) and music (Ross Duffin) and the Freedman Center at the campus’ Kelvin Smith Library (Jared Bendis, also an art history graduate student).
“We are going to act this out in two ways,” Neils said. In the first take, the students will depict the image on the flat surface of the temple honoring Athena. The second take is as the artist would have imagined the scene live, with the gods sitting in the semi-circular, without turning their backs on the procession, Neils said.
The Parthenon has stood for 2,500 years on the Acropolis or high hill overlooking the city of Athens and suffered damage from a 1687 explosion. A frieze, which runs 524 feet long and three feet tall, is a world monument that has ignited the international “Elgin Marble” debate over ownership of art as pieces of the frieze are now scattered around the globe.
The Parthenon continues to be a tourist destination and fascinates visitors with its portrayal of the Panathenaic festival to honor the city’s namesake Athena. The festival is depicted in dynamic figures of 378 people and 245 horses, cattle and sheep in a procession that starts on the west side and continues along the north and south sides toward the centerpiece of the seated Olympian gods.
Neils, the Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History and Classics, reunited the
pieces pictorially in her 2001 book, The Parthenon Frieze, and solved the puzzle that
other art historians had said was a design flaw in the Parthenon’s construction.
The flaw, others have said, is that the gods face the procession from both sides of the Parthenon but have their backs turned to the ongoing peplos ceremony honoring Athena.
The students plan to prove their professor’s hypothesis that the Parthenon artist’s original intent was to have the gods seated in a semi-circle before five figures presenting the festival robe (peplos) to Athena.
Circular seating correlates with ancient Greece theater and political settings, Neils said.
Prior to publishing her book, Neils scanned Homer to see if there was a reference to this semi-circular arrangement on the Parthenon but did not find any. Shortly after publication, she found support in a statement made by the ancient Greek Poet Pindar who had written about “the fine seats in a circle where the kings of the Sky and of Earth took their place.”
The Reenactment Cast includes:
Seminar Students
• Roshi Ahmadian-Tehrani, Artemis, props and costume manager
• Kristen Herdman, Demeter, graphic designer
• Eileen Sabrina Herman, Hermes, Webmaster
• Austin Howell, Aphrodite, photography
• Marshall Hughes, Hephaistos, budget manager
• Rachel Hunt, Dionysus, editor and recorder
• Sara Lin, Ares, music supervisor
• Jacqueline Santiago, Athena, photographer
• Timothy Trombley, Apollo, director
• Ryan Carr, Poseidon, publicity
Classics majors
Rachel Gardner, Hera
Zachary Kloss, Zeus
Student volunteer
Sarah Doody, Hawken School, Hebe