Classical Interventions: Hegel, Klenze and the Aesthetics of Purity

Abstract

ABSTRACT In August of 1834, in a ceremony atop the Athenian Acropolis, the German architect Leo von Klenze ordered the dismantling and removal of all non-classical buildings from the hilltop. The results of the ensuing purification transformed the site from a multicultural complex of buildings that had accrued over centuries into what is essentially a minimalist museum, as we know it today. I argue that we can best understand Klenze’s classical intervention if we view it in the context of the discourse of a Romantic-era aesthetics of purity through which it appears self-evidently as the correct course of action. The most comprehensive articulation of this discourse appears in the lectures on aesthetics that Hegel gave in Berlin in the 1820s. Hegel argues that the perfection of Greek classical art emerges only as an overcoming of the misshapen and failed attempts at art that preceded it, which he calls “symbolic” or “oriental” (Egyptian, Persian, Indian). The human spirit, Geist, can materialize itself as a work of art only by Europeanizing itself, by shedding all oriental otherness. We can read Klenze’s intervention, which strips away all remnants of Ottoman Turkish architecture from the acropolis, as this aesthetics of purity written in stone.