The statuary at the Acropolis (High City) is probably the finest marble carving ever done. Did they know how to soften the stone for working and then harden it again for the ages? The greatest European works, including Michelangelo's, are sincere copies of these Greek masterpieces.

Here's the other end of the snake that started on the previous page. Records made by the frieze-thieves are poor, and so it's unclear where the snake, or the three guys shown below, figured in the decoration of the Parthenon.

The conservators have left some artifacts as found, and have taken great pains to restore some, carefully shading the modern work so there's no confusion (as there was at Knossos) about what's original and what's speculative. Of course, the Athens ruins, being half as ancient, are in better shape.

The principal subjects seem to have been limited to long-haired women, goofy looking guys, and horses ...but could they sculpt!

What a lively time the old Greeks must have had with their wonderfully varied pantheon! Here we've got a woman's head, wings, and what looks like it was probably a bird's body -- a harpy? No nose (of course) but a hint of the magnificently plastic way the sculptors managed hair, musculature, and drapery (clothing). We were overwhelmed with the variety and quality of this little museum's offering:

They had wonderful stone to work with, even if after a couple of millennia, the noses, ears, hands, and genitalia seem to have mostly broken off. (In this latter particular, a few centuries of unbelievable prudery resulted in officially sanctioned defacement, shades of the Taliban, although in this case mostly promulgated by Catholic and Greek Orthodox churchmen. But what, exactly, did these worthies have against noses? As you will see here, only one nose, of all the statues in the Acropolis Museum, survives.)

Noselessness aside, these are gorgeous sculptures. Some are well enough preserved so that we can see evidence that they were also intricately and brightly painted -- unlike the austere classical and roman copies with which we're familiar.

Omigod! Is that a nose? (at right)

Thanks to the insensitive depradations of the Venetians and Turks (may the perpetrators eternally writhe in aesthetic hell), it's hard to tell what some of these fragments are ... but the shapes are so gorgeously fluid, the detailing of drapery so seductive...

One constant observed throughout our European travels: all museum tours end in the gift shop. Here the shop was a shed against a wall, where the selection of affordable images (postcards, little books) was meagre. There was, however, one fascinating book of photographs with overlays showing how the artist thought the originals looked (based on archaelogical research and a few present-day accounts.)

Here's a small sampling of "then and now" images from the Acropolis.