The Parthenon Sculptures

The sculptures were carved under the direction of Phidias in the years around four forty BC, at the height of Athenian power. Look at the horsemen on the frieze: dozens of riders overlap in a relief only a few centimetres deep, yet each horse and each cloak seems to move. On the pediment figures, the drapery of the reclining goddesses clings to the bodies as if wet, a trick that became the signature of Athenian style. The figures were carved to be seen twelve metres up against the sky, so many details of the backs, invisible on the temple, are finished with astonishing care.

Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, had about half the surviving sculptures removed between eighteen oh one and eighteen twelve and sold them to the British government in eighteen sixteen. The remaining pieces are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, which has left space for these, and the Greek government has requested their return for decades. The museum's position is that the sculptures belong to a shared world heritage and that talks continue. Whatever your view, the gallery, built in the nineteen thirties with money from the dealer Joseph Duveen, gives you the rare chance to walk the length of the frieze at eye level.

Did You Know? In the nineteen thirties Duveen's workmen scrubbed some of the sculptures with copper tools and abrasives to make them whiter, damaging the surface and causing a scandal when it became known.