The Parthenon in Nashville Brings Temple Ruins Back to Life

It’s the Athens of the South, too, with the world’s only Parthenon replica.

G reetings from Nashville, mostly known today as Music City, but its other sobriquet — the Athens of the South — suits it as well, and has for far longer. From its earliest days, Nashville was a college and university town. Its capitol is a Greek Revival pile inspired by a monument in Athens — the Greek Athens — honoring Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, ritual madness, and theater. Now, that’s truly politically correct.

Nashville was first called “the Athens of the West” in the 1820s, when Tennessee was still on the edge of the country. Oh, and the Parthenon’s here. In the heart of the city’s Centennial Park is a 1:1 scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens. It’s the only replica in the world, and the only Parthenon with air-conditioning. It’s an art museum, history museum, and not to be missed.

And it’s convincing. Set on an expansive lawn, it looks very much like the mid-fifth-century temple on the Acropolis. It’s got the outer colonnade of Doric columns topped by a pediment packed with sculptures and the metopes, or squared relief sculptures, below it. Inside an inner colonnade is the naos, or the nave. It houses the 42-foot-high sculpture of Athena Parthenos, or at least our sense of it, since scholars think that only small versions of it still exist.

She’s impressive. Athena is the daughter of Zeus, having sprung from his forehead moments after he complained about a headache, and the goddess of wisdom. All Athenas are serious, austere, and commanding. Here, she wears a helmet, as she’s the goddess of war.

The original Athena wasn’t marble but gold and ivory. Nashville’s Athena is painted but has the same palette. This might startle visitors expecting white marble, but we’ve known for years that most Greek sculptures, including the sculptures of the Parthenon, were painted to look like us, or the best-looking, most rosy-faced among us. Nashville’s Parthenon pediment, metope, and frieze sculptures aren’t painted. The building’s material is cast-concrete aggregate, left ungussied.

I think paint would be a bridge too far, and I hear that even today, Athena shocks. Before I went to Nashville, I spent a day in New York and visited the Met to see its schlocky Winslow Homer exhibition, Crosscurrents. The Met’s Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color isn’t an exhibition but an intervention occurring in the museum’s splendid Greek galleries.

Here and there, the Met is exhibiting reproductions of sculptures, some from its collection, some not, painted as scholars now think they were when they were displayed in ancient times. It’s good thinking and, though I don’t doubt scholars are right, it’s an acquired taste. I’m all for the Met shaking things up as it did in the Greek galleries.

Back to Nashville. Why is a Parthenon replica here? That’s probably what many of its 350,000 yearly visitors ask. Centennial Park was the site of the 1897 exposition marking the 100th anniversary of Tennessee’s statehood. It was a year late because the economy in the mid-1890s was, as ours is today, hookworm sick. Once the fair finally happened, it was the party of the postbellum era. It celebrated Tennessee but also signaled a new South recovering from the war and looking toward a brighter time.

The Centennial Exposition was the biggest the South had ever seen and drew from Chicago’s Columbian Exposition from 1893. These fairs are fascinating. They’re self-aggrandizing, aspirational, allusive, and fun. The 200-acre Centennial’s centerpiece was the Parthenon, which was the Fine Arts Building, displaying a 1,100-painting show as well as the Nashville pavilion. Buildings devoted to commerce, agriculture, education, and history, as well as the Parthenon, presented a place where tried-and-true values met the modern world to go arm in arm into the future with confidence and in harmony.

Memphis got a pyramid-shaped building, and among the other main events was the Negro Building. A vast portion of the Exposition celebrated foreign cultures. The Egyptian pavilion starred belly dancers. Old Vienna advertised “the best beer in the world.” Gondolas plied the artificial lake built for the event.

Nashville was a dry city, but Centennial Park was specially incorporated as its own town, one where booze was legal, for sale, and flowed like water over a TVA dam in rainy season. The Exposition was electrified. Tennessee had never seen so big and dense a space using the new technology.

The Centennial Exposition structures were meant to be temporary. They weren’t exactly made of papier-mâché, but their shelf-life was short. The Parthenon, though, had a foundation, wood frame, and some brick for fireproofing. It was, after all, a space to exhibit art, all of which was borrowed. While the other structures went to the dump, the Parthenon remained, in part as a souvenir, in part as a hall for performances and parties.

By the 1920s, though, it was in sad shape. The Nashville-born philanthropist and art collector James Cowan committed to funding a permanent Parthenon, adding a gift of 63 American paintings to what he hoped would be the city’s art museum. It took a few years, but in 1931 a new-and-improved Parthenon opened. Unlike the 1897 Parthenon, the one I saw re-creates the camber, or arch, of the Athens temple’s horizontal lines and the entasis, or convex curve, of its columns. And unlike the 1897 Parthenon, built to house galleries, this Parthenon has a correct temple interior.

The City of Nashville owns and operates the Parthenon now. There’s an admission charge — $10 a head with reduced admission for the young and elderly. I believe that all museums should be free and hope the city and the foundation supporting Centennial Park will move in this direction by making admission free for Davidson County and the counties surrounding it. The Parthenon is so wonderful. Those in an authority position should want the locals to have access unimpeded by price.

John Earley was a New York–based architect who invented a concrete formula that had a polished, pebbly finish. He’s called “the man who made concrete beautiful.” In developing the material, Early wanted something with the look of early Byzantine buildings in Italy. That was close enough. The Parthenon’s planners used his concrete for the exterior, roof, and sculptures.

It wasn’t until 1990 that money could be found for Athena, though only a white, faux-marble one. She got her gilding in 2002. Local artist Alan LeQuire created it. By Athena’s left leg is the giant shield depicting on its exterior a clutch of fierce Amazon warriors, and on its interior the Gigantomachy, the battle between the Titans who once ruled the Earth and the heavens, and the Greek gods, who bested them and sent them to oblivion. Athena holds a sculpture of Nike, the goddess of victory, in her right hand. Knowing that Athena is 42 feet tall is one thing. Seeing Nike in her hand, looking like a doll, and knowing she’s my height, about 6′3″, drives the point home. Athena’s big.

When Athena premiered in 1990, a local minister protested, telling the Tennessean, the Nashville paper, that “idolatry came to Nashville in the form of art.” “Athena,” he said, was a graven image. He and, now and then, others mistake the Parthenon as a church when they learn it’s a replica of a temple. The Greeks had gods for everything, including stupidity. Koalemos is, or at least Aristophanes says he is, the god, or spirit, of foolishness. Enough said.

In deciphering the appearance of Athena’s shield, the Parthenon’s curator consulted Evelyn Harrison, from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and Brunilde Ridgway, from Bryn Mawr. Two more revered Greek art scholars were hard to find. The Parthenon is very serious about getting it right.

I loved the Looking Back exhibition commemorating the Centennial’s 125th anniversary. These things can be so rote, but this one is smart and sparkling. The curator at the Parthenon dove into archives all over Tennessee to find the perfect, never-before-displayed artifacts and photographs.

The look of the fair is summoned through wall murals based on photographs from 1897. And photographs, ephemera, and letters make the fair come alive as it was experienced by the people who went. Unknown collectors learned about the staff’s detective work and lent their objects. Among the treasures is a book of photographs taken and assembled in 1897 by an amateur Nashvillian. It’s been in private hands since then.

The curator also found sheet music for tunes performed at the fair. She arranged for them to be recorded. They’re playing in the background, a feature that’s lovely and immersive. If we’re at a history museum show on World War I, we don’t want to feel as if we’re in a trench by the Somme, but in this show about the Centennial, we like a sense of being there.

The Parthenon’s museum work goes further. As part of the 1920s reconstruction, Nashville’s parks authority commissioned a set of plaster casts of the pediment sculptures from the British Museum. These sculptures, the centerpiece of the Elgin Marbles, are shadows of their ancient selves. During a siege of Athens by the Venetian navy in 1687, the Parthenon was used as a weapons depot by local Ottomans. Then, the temple and its sculptures, though 2,200 years old, were remarkably intact.

A lucky, or disastrous, missile from a Venetian ship landed on the temple roof and mushroomed the thing. What Lord Elgin brought to London in the 1810s were the blast-damaged remains.

Nashville’s Parthenon pediment sculpture draws from the British Museum ruins but also from detailed drawings of the pre-bomb temple made in 1674 by the French artist and tourist Jacques Carrey. These drawings were well known among antiquities scholars in the 1890s. Designers of the Centennial-era Parthenon consulted the published drawings and other conjectures in producing an intact sculptural program for the West Pediment, depicting the contest between Athena and Poseidon for control of Attica. They ditched the East Pediment’s Birth of Athena and displayed Athena’s and Poseidon’s tussle on both sides. In the 1920s rebuild, each pediment got its correct batch of replicas, using its plaster casts as models.

These casts are at the Parthenon, arranged more or less as the originals are in the Duveen Galleries at the British Museum. Almost no one thinks of plaster casts as works of art, but they are. In Nashville, alas, treating them as art is a recent tactic. For decades, visitors could touch them. The Parthenon didn’t have doors until the 1980s, so the space was open to the weather. Today, the casts are filthy. The museum is just starting a campaign to clean them. To its great credit, the conservation will happen on site in spaces the public can see.

Curious as I am, I looked at the catalogue of art displayed in the Parthenon in 1897. The museum has a copy. Tennesseans wanted to get it right then. The fair’s planners worked to convey a place that was cultured, not avant-garde, not snooty, but embracing the best high-establishment taste in contemporary art. A New York–based selection committee included George de Forest Brush, Robert Swain Gifford, Edwin Blashfield, and J. G. Brown. Edmund Tarbell and John Enneking were on the Boston committee. There were juries for Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago, too. The choice of the Parthenon itself as a model displayed a taste for the best and a nose for cultural icons.

The effort wasn’t entirely altruistic. Much of the art was for sale, with the fair getting a cut. That’s okay. The first few Whitney Biennials I saw had price tags on the art. It’s middling art by middling artists such as Thomas Anshutz, Harry Siddons Mowbray, Dwight Tryon, Carroll Beckwith, Charles Woodbury, and Walter Gay. All the jurors got three or four works in this section. There was a loan component, too, with good things like Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of Canova, a nice Monet from the Union League Club in Chicago, a real Ribera, and a good Bouguereau. The exhibition tells us that 99 percent of art is either bad or doesn’t live well into the distant future. That’s high-establishment taste in operation.

I visited the Parthenon on Friday afternoon. I’m always happy to see lots of people in museums, and this place was comfortably filled. It’s back to attendance levels before the Chinese coronavirus mass hysteria and hypnosis.

It’s clear, looking at the license plates on the cars in the parking lot, voyeuristic and nosy as I am, that it’s a tourist attraction. People from Nashville love it, too.

Most of Cowan’s American paintings are on view, too. There’s a nice, big, early Maine picture by Church and good Bierstadts and Giffords. There’s work by Ernest Lawson, one of my favorite artists, Benjamin West, Elihu Vedder, and Frederick Frieseke. The Frist, Nashville’s art gallery on Broadway in the center of town, doesn’t collect. It’s a Kunsthalle. The Parthenon is the city’s collecting art museum. I’ll write more about this over the weekend.

The Parthenon has lots of public programs planned and, coincidentally, most are about color and Greek sculpture. It also sponsors programs for children in Nashville’s schools. Greek mythology can be gory, creepy, and deep. That said, many of the stories are suitable for children, and teenagers are best served when they’re taught the Greek classics, not fake pronouns, race grudges, and gender-bender burlesque.

The Parthenon’s a unique cultural experience and one that mustn’t be missed on a visit to Nashville.