Review: The Acropolis Museum
By Sofia Lambis, Second Year English
The Acropolis Museum is one of over 1000 museum views available to explore on Google Arts and Culture. The site offers free virtual tours of museums all around the world, alongside access to online exhibitions and photo galleries. If you’re planning to peruse the site, your time will be well spent exploring the Acropolis Museum Online. The project itself is very practical – both completely free and accessible (you don’t have to travel all the way to Athens). On the site you can explore the artefacts, zooming in on photos to see the detail of the statues and information about them. A feature I appreciated was the search filter, which allows you to locate specific sculptors, topics and artistic mediums. Finding what I wanted became much easier, I didn’t need to wander around a museum hoping in vain that what I was looking for would appear in front of me. The online museum strikes a good balance between allowing you to get lost in a labyrinth of artefacts yet quickly find anything you’re specifically searching for. The virtual exhibitions let you explore the details and symbolism behind artefacts close-up and at your leisure – minutiae that might be lost if looking at it behind a glass case.
Despite the successes of online access of the museum, it doesn’t allow you to see the gaps left by missing or stolen artefacts as clearly as one can see in person. When you enter the Acropolis Museum, you are greeted by five Caryatids (sculpted female figures used instead of columns as support). Their size and intricate carvings are striking, yet there is an empty podium among them which equally catches your eye. This is a space reserved for their sister who is kept in the British museum. In person, her absence is palpable.
Elsewhere in the museum, they have continued to highlight the absence of missing and stolen artefacts by replacing them with copies. The ancient Parthenon Marbles are interspersed with plaster replicas of the sculptures held in the British Museum. The replicas’ stark whiteness deliberately jars with the beige of the ancient stone, a contrast that perhaps doesn’t stand out as much through the screen. In person, this focus on absence brings into perspective just how much has been taken. There’s something moving about seeing the Caryatids without their sister, the gaps in the friezes, and the spaces left empty for them. The national pride in these artefacts, as well as the hope they will return can be felt clearly. For me, these emotions weren’t felt as strongly through the online museum.
The museum views project definitely has its merits – it's practical, easily accessible and great for research. But perhaps, like the plaster casts and the ancient stone, there are some qualities from the real thing that simply can’t be replicated.