The Parthenon Frieze
Workshop of Phidias (About 490 to 430 BC) · About 443 to 438 BC
A band of marble a little over a metre high runs right round the rectangular core of the top floor, at eye level, with the Parthenon itself visible through the glass beyond. It once ran round the outer wall of the temple's inner building, high up in the shadow of the colonnade, and shows a single great procession: horsemen gathering and setting off, chariots, elders, musicians, youths leading cattle and sheep for sacrifice, women carrying vessels, and at the east end the gods seated on stools while a folded cloth, the peplos woven each year for Athena, is handed over. Most scholars read it as the Panathenaic procession, the festival of the city, and it is the first time in Greek temple sculpture that ordinary Athenians rather than gods and heroes fill the frame.
The relief is only a few centimetres deep, yet horses overlap three and four abreast without confusion. The sculptors tilted the whole surface slightly forward and carved the upper parts more deeply so that the figures would read from the ground far below. Look at the riders' cloaks flying behind them, the veins standing on the horses' bellies, and the way the pace of the procession slows as it approaches the gods. Original blocks are honey-coloured marble; the white plaster casts that fill the gaps stand for pieces in the British Museum, the Louvre and elsewhere, and the museum makes no attempt to hide the difference.
About half of the surviving frieze is here in Athens, and half in London, removed by Lord Elgin's workmen between 1801 and 1805. This gallery was designed, quite openly, to make the case for reuniting them, and the argument is made simply by walking round it: the story only makes sense as a single continuous line. Start at the south-west corner, where the horsemen are still saddling up, and follow the procession in both directions to the east front where they meet.
Did You Know? The Parthenon Gallery is turned twenty-three degrees off the rest of the building so that the frieze sits in the same orientation as the temple outside.
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