What if they put a coffee shop in the Parthenon?

The current exhibition “The rediscovery of the ancient” (Rome, Foro Romano, Curia Iulia, until February 23) is not only the refined experience of those who want to discover the watercolors from the Grand Tour of Greece. It is also an opportunity to reflect on what it means to us, nowadays, the artistic heritage as a whole. Is it something immutable or does it change over time? How do we have to interpret its change?
Works by Edward Dodwell, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and classical Scholar, and by Simone Pomardi, an Italian artist are now exhibited in Rome. In 1805 and 1806, the two men took a trip to Greece, along with the Englishman William Gell. They stayed for about 18 months, traveled throughout southern Greece, then part of the Ottoman empire, visiting Zakynthos, Phokis, Boetia, Athens and Attica, Thessaly, and Peloponnese.

 

On this trip the two men made hundreds of drawings and watercolors, most of which are now on display. Their works represent the point of view of European men of the nineteenth century. The entire collection is richest known corpus of illustrations of Greece as it appeared to the eyes of the last generation before the creation of the modern state.
Of course there are plenty of drawings and watercolors of the Parthenon. For Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi that architecture was undoubtedly the icon of classicism. And many of us, today, do consider it in the same way.
However what Dowell and Pomardi saw (as well as what we see ) was not the Parthenon of the origins: both in form and in substance. The ancients, for example, did not worship the architecture as such, but the statue of Athena Pathénos that was inside. The statue was then destroyed after 10 centuries. In Byzantine time, the building changed form and function to become a Byzantine church and then a Catholic one. In the Ottoman period it was converted into a mosque.
The story of the transformation of the Parthenon goes on and on. But this short example is enough to show that the Parthenon (which occasionally Greece thought to put on sale in order to pay its debts) has never been an untouchable entity. Like the Parthenon, so most of the UNESCO World heritage has never stopped changing through the centuries.

 

The artistic heritage increases or decreases its value depending both on how it is used and on the way communities interact with it. If you do not remember this concept, then not only you will not be able to understand why some pieces of the heritage must be preserved, but also you will not have the tools to judge and asses their changes.

 

This idea can also be applied to museums and to their architectonic and cultural changes, as perfectly explained by the Italian architect Michele De Lucchi. According to him, “cafes and bookshops today in museums, and the entrace hall, to define the success of an exhibition space, worth as much as the galleries and the beautiful exhibitions inside. The importance of entertainment in places of culture is part of the transformation of the attitude with which you enter in museums today, which is much more relaxed, amused, curious, less serious, less technical and scholars. And this is the most beautiful thing that’s happened in the last few years”.

July 15, 2015