Sculptuur van twee schikgodinnen van het Parthenon 1857 - 1859

Curator: Look at this incredible photograph by Caldesi & Co, taken between 1857 and 1859. It's titled "Sculpture of two goddesses of fate from the Parthenon.” Editor: My goodness, the weight of that marble practically settles in my own bones! The heavy drapery, the implied rest... I find it deeply melancholic. Curator: It really captures the texture and gravity of the sculpture. Of course, we have to remember these are fragments – sections of the original sculptures from the east pediment of the Parthenon, now housed in the British Museum. Caldesi was capturing these treasures for a wider audience. Editor: It is clever how they have transformed the sculpted scene into photographical commodity. The light suggests they're deliberately trying to make the marble look soft, digestible to their 19th century consumer. I'm curious about the photographic process: the specific chemicals, the printing paper and the way these enhance our perception of texture... It really pushes against the perceived boundaries between “high art” and craft. Curator: Precisely! The photograph offers a new materiality, almost softening the blow of history and loss of context. Don't you feel a little pang of sadness and awe mixed together looking at it? These figures witnessed so much. Editor: Well, my interest lies more with the Victorian viewers, how did they understand the production of these images of antiquity and how these processes transformed culture and taste? To what end and whose hands would produce art for profit, not posterity? Curator: Fascinating considerations. Looking at the photograph again I see, almost floating above all the labor, a quiet kind of defiant peace in these figures; even broken, still somehow transcendent. Editor: Perhaps, yet every artistic representation, even in capturing ‘defiant peace’, echoes the conditions under which they are made and received. A beautiful image with complicated roots!