The Greek Courtyard
Various, casts after Phidias, Praxiteles and others · Casts made about 1900 to 1912 after originals of the fifth and fourth century BC
Under a high glass roof stands a corner of the Athenian Acropolis: the porch of the Erechtheion with its six caryatids, the maidens who carry the roof on their heads, and beside it a section of the Parthenon with its columns and frieze at true size. Around them are casts of the great free standing statues of classical Greece, the Doryphoros, the Discobolus, the Apollo Belvedere, the Nike of Samothrace. Nowhere else in Moscow can you feel the actual scale of Greek architecture, and the hall was designed to give exactly that shock.
The casts were ordered from workshops in Athens, Paris, Berlin and London, each moulded from the original, so that the surfaces record every weathered flake of the marble. Look up at the frieze and at the Parthenon pediment figures, the reclining river god and the horses of the sun, and then find the caryatids and notice that they are not identical: each stands with a different leg forward, and their braided hair thickens at the neck to strengthen the stone. The architect Roman Klein built the hall so that visitors would come from the Egyptian and Trojan rooms straight into this bright space, as though passing from the ancient East into Greece.
All this was the heart of Ivan Tsvetaev's dream of a museum where Moscow students could study antiquity without leaving the city. The originals are scattered between Athens, London, Paris and Rome, and some, like the Parthenon frieze, are divided between museums and will probably never be reunited; here they can be seen together. The hall was damaged when bombs shattered the roof in 1941, and the casts were repaired after the war. Sit on a bench and take your time; the light changes through the day.
Did You Know? The caryatids are cast from the originals in Athens and London, so the Moscow porch is one of the few places where all six maidens stand together again.
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