1843 Breton print ACROPOLIS, ATHENS, GREECE

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1843 Breton print ACROPOLIS, ATHENS, GREECE Nice print titled Acropole d'Athenes (Grece) , from wood engraving with fine detail and clear impression, nice hand coloring, image size is approx. 11 x 16 cm. From: Ernest Breton, Monuments de tous les peuples, Paris. Click or image for larger version Athens The Acropolis . Many of Athens' bequests (all, if the theatre of Herodes Atticus may be regarded as an embodiment of the city's literature) to the world are expressed in and around the Acropolis, the natural centre of Athens. Rising some 500 feet above sea level, with springs near the base and a single approach, the Acropolis was an obvious choice of citadel and sanctuary from earliest times. That it could be something more is evidenced in the Parthenon, one of the brightest jewels in mankind's, let alone Athens', treasury. As deceptively simple as Socrates' conversation, this columned, oblong temple is the expression--without a trace of strain or conflict--of a human ideal of clarity and unity. The architectural genius is concentrated in the exterior, for within was a shelter for the goddess Athena--the patroness who lent her name to the city--not a place for mass worship. Its spiritual quality, the sensation of being almost afloat, is enhanced by the lack of a single, straight, vertical line in the peristyle (the surrounding colonnade) ; each vertical is almost imperceptibly bowed, theoretically meeting some 11,500 feet in the sky. The columns, of diminishing thickness toward the centre of the colonnade, with diminishing space between them, lean toward the centre, too; all these differences are virtually invisible to the beholder. Even the 20 flutings of each column diminish in width as they rise, and the humblest details of craftsmanship are perfect. On the northeast corner of the interior are faint traces of Christian wall paintings dating from the temple's service as the Church of St. Mary, and in the southwest corner of the porch is the stair leading to the minaret that was added when the building was a Turkish mosque. The Parthenon was also used as a powder magazine, when, on September 26, 1687, Venetian artillery, attacking the Turks from the Hill of the Muses, scored a direct hit. A member of the party with the field commander, General Königsmark, wrote, "How it dismayed His Excellency to destroy the beautiful temple which had existed three thousand years!" Conversely, Francesco Morosini, the commander in chief, when reporting to the Venetian government, called it "a fortunate shot." Wishing to bring home more than just good news, he also tried to lower Athena's horses in the centre of the west pediment, but his men's dexterity was not as highly developed as their marksmanship and the masterpieces smashed to bits on the rock below. The Turks regained possession of the Acropolis the following year and later began selling souvenirs to Europeans. The Duc de Choiseul, formerly French ambassador in Constantinople, picked up a piece of the frieze and two metopes. In 1801 the British ambassador, Lord Elgin, arrived with an imperial decree permitting him to pull down Turkish houses on the Acropolis to seek fragments of sculpture. Among the 50 pieces he took home (the shipping charges were 75,000, a huge sum for those days) was most of the remaining Parthenon sculpture, which he later sold to the British Museum for 35,000. The Greeks have forgiven the clumsiness of the Venetian engineers, the accuracy of Venetian cannoneers, and the vandalism of the Turks, but they still nurture rancour against Elgin. He also removed one of the caryatids from the Erechtheum, a temple of Athena called after a shrine dedicated to the legendary king Erechtheus or to Poseidon Erechtheus, but replaced it with a plaster cast. From London he sent a town clock for Athens, duly erected in the Agora and lost in the fire of 1885. The Erechtheum (5th century BC), which later became a church under the Byzantines and subsequently the Turkish commander's harem, was originally dedic... read more

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