Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens

Abstract

Classical Greek monuments were meant to be seen. The poet Pindar often refers to the conspicuousness of architecture: “When a work is begun,” he declares, “it is necessary to make its façade far-beaming” (Olympian 6.3–4), and a sacred precinct can be tēlephantos, “shining from afar” (fr. 5 SM). According to Plato, the works of Pheidias were made “conspicuously” (periphanōs), literally, “so as to seen round about,” a term that can also be used to distinguish freestanding sculpture from relief (Meno 91d). The philosopher may have been thinking of Pheidias’ great bronze Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, the spear and helmet of which, we are told, were visible to ships at sea. The conspicuousness of Greek architecture was integral to its function. The Acropolis itself, for instance, was the supreme monument of the most powerful and long-lived democracy of Classical antiquity. Soaring over Athens, its great buildings—the temple of Athena Nike, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum—were statements of the official ideology of the Athenian empire and testaments to its glory. Clustered around them were numerous private and public dedications: statues, objets d’art, and inscriptions on stone. Today these monuments are landmarks of art history and magnets for tourism. Curiously, however, many of the Acropolis monuments were more or less invisible in the 400s BCE. Visibility was circumstantial and contingent, in ways that I shall elaborate below. From this starting point flow two questions: what does it mean for a democracy that its most glorious public monuments should be, to a greater or lesser degree, unseen? And what are the consequences for art history? The Acropolis monuments were subject to at least three distinct types of invisibility. First, literal invisibility, in the sense of occlusion or concealment. In this case, any light that strikes the object does not bounce back and hit an observer’s eye. Were one to bury a statue in a hole, it would be occluded in this sense; the statue would be, literally, invisible.