Past Perfect: Among the Gods

030

The American painter, photographer and diplomat William James Stillman (1828-1901) knew just about everyone who was anyone. He befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other pre-Raphaelite painters, traveled with art critic John Ruskin in Switzerland and crossed the Atlantic on the same ship as the singer Jenny Lind. He spent summers in the Adirondacks with the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, historian Charles Eliot Norton and geologist Louis Agassiz, and he numbered the poets James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among his friends. The youngest of nine children born to the owner of a machine shop in Schenectady, New York, Stillman graduated from Union College in 1848. The following year he studied landscape painting under Frederick Church; then he sailed to Europe to continue his studies. When Stillman returned to the United States in 1855, he took a job as the fine-arts editor of the New York Evening Post and co-founded The Crayon, a short-lived art journal. He took up photography in 1859; a decade later he took the photographs of the Acropolis that appear on the following pages. After stints as American consul to Italy and Crete, Stillman spent his last decades working as a roving photographer, amateur archaeologist, painter and correspondent. He died in Surrey, England, at the age of 73.

031

The monumental gateway to the Acropolis, the Propylaea, was designed by the architect Mnesicles in 437 B.C. The four Ionic columns at upper right form the western facade of the Temple of Athena Nike Apteros, which was completed in 426 B.C. The temple’s foundations had been exposed around 1840 (30 years before Stillman arrived on the Acropolis), when a Turkish gun bastion was removed from the site. The so-called Frankish Tower rising behind the temple was erected during the medieval period. In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann paid to have the building razed in an effort to remove all of the Acropolis’s post-classical buildings.

033

The Porch of the Caryatids projects boldly from the Acropolis like the prow of a ship. Columns carved in the shape of maidens, the Caryatids support the southern porch of the fifth-century B.C. Erechtheum, a temple that once housed cults honoring Athena (goddess of wisdom), Erechtheus (Athena’s foster son and a legendary king of Athens), Poseidon (god of the sea) and Hephaestus (god of fire). According to legend, the word “caryatid” comes from Caryae, a region in the southeastern Peloponnesus where women danced with baskets on their heads.

Not far from the Erechtheum is the Parthenon, a 228-foot-long Doric temple designed by the architects Callicrates and Ictinus. The building was erected between 447 and 432 B.C. under the supervision of the artist Phidias (who carved the Parthenon’s sculptures, including the colossal ivory-and-gold statue of Athena that once stood inside the temple). Stillman’s southeastern view of the Parthenon captures the elegant simplicity of the building’s soaring marble columns, as well as the damage wrought by a massive explosion in 1687, when Venetian canon fire ignited Turkish gunpowder stored within the building (Greece was then under Ottoman occupation).

The American painter, photographer and diplomat William James Stillman (1828-1901) knew just about everyone who was anyone. He befriended Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other pre-Raphaelite painters, traveled with art critic John Ruskin in Switzerland and crossed the Atlantic on the same ship as the singer Jenny Lind. He spent summers in the Adirondacks with the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, historian Charles Eliot Norton and geologist Louis Agassiz, and he numbered the poets James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among his friends. The youngest of nine children born to the owner of a machine shop in […]