Weight of the World on These Women

Laser work cuts grime, time off Acropolis' ancient maidens

Liz Alderman, New York Times

July 8, 2014

Athens --

For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fire
s of war blazed around them, bullets nicked their robes, and bombs scarred
 their curvaceous bodies. When one of them was kidnapped

in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be heard weeping
 in the night.

But only recently have the famed Caryatid statues, among the great divas
 of ancient Greece, had a chance to reveal their full glory.

For the last 2 1/2 years, conservators at the Acropolis Museum have been
 cleaning the maidens, Ionic columns in female form believed to have been
 sculpted by Alkamenes, a student of ancient Greece's greatest artist,

Phidias. Their initial function was to prop up a part of the Erechtheion, the
 sacred temple near the Parthenon

 that paid homage to the first kings of Athens and the Greek gods Athena
 and Poseidon.

Main attraction

Today they are star attractions in the museum; the originals outside were
 replaced with reproductions in 1979

to keep the real maidens safe.

Over the centuries, a coat of black grime came to mask their beauty.
 Now conservators have restored them to their original ivory glow,
 using a specially developed laser technology.

To coincide with the museum's fifth anniversary, the women
 - minus one - went on full display in June, gleaming from their
 modern makeover.

The missing Caryatid is installed at the British Museum in London,
 which acquired it nearly a century ago after Lord Elgin, the British
 ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had it sawed off the
 Erechtheion's porch, along

with shiploads of adornments from the Parthenon to decorate his
 mansion in Scotland before selling the pieces to pay debts.

Greek and British authorities have long fought over the return of
 these so-called Elgin marbles, a dispute that heated up again
 recently when actors George Clooney, Matt Damon and
 Bill Murray came out in support of

 the sculptures' being returned home during an appearance in
 London for the movie "The Monuments Men."

 That ignited a firestorm in Britain, which maintains that
 Lord Elgin saved the marbles from destruction, and
 acquired them fairly.

New volley in battle

The controversy may flare anew as the British Museum plans
 an exhibition of the human body in Greek

 sculpture for next spring, using some of the marbles from the
 Parthenon.

Greeks have not been shy about using the Caryatid restoration
 to help press their case. While the Caryatids' restoration is not
 part of a specific campaign to get the marbles back, the fresh
 cleaning shows that the museum can support their return, said
 Dimitris Pantermalis, the president of the Acropolis Museum.

"We insist on a solution" to the Elgin marbles," Pantermalis said.
 "A country must be ready when it claims something, and the
 Acropolis Museum has completed this."

In the meantime, the missing Caryatid is glaring in its absence
 from the platform, a subversive display

 of resistance that is reflected one floor up in the museum,
 where large swaths of the Acropolis frieze owned by the
 British Museum are represented as chalky plaster copies
 of the originals.

On a recent weekday, Pantermalis wove through crowds
 who stood enthralled around a special dais on which the
 five remaining Caryatids were displayed. "With the
 pollution erased, we can read more about the history
of the last 2,500 years," he said.

The museum plans to clean a number of other architectural
 sculptures from the Acropolis, using the laser technology,
 said Costas Vassiliadis, a conservator who heads the
 restoration team, although he declined to

 give details because the new projects had not yet been
 announced.