Walking through the museum while thinking about Athena

I hadn’t intended to go silent on this blog. When I arrived in Cambridge, I imagined posting at least weekly - perhaps more - charting my discoveries as they unfolded. I had in mind the blog I kept during a fellowship in Durham two years ago, where writing regularly helped me reflect on my adventures as they happened.

But things have not quite turned out that way. Although I drafted several posts, most of my time here has been devoted to writing the article I came to Cambridge to work on. Recently I found myself somewhat stuck. So here I am - returning to blogging.

Today I have come to the Fitzwilliam Museum. With less than a fortnight left in Cambridge, I realised I would regret not making more of the city’s many cultural offerings. There is still plenty I want to do in the Classics Faculty Library before I leave, but it felt important to take some time to explore.

I am drafting this first in a sketchbook I bought in the museum shop. I have just discovered that the museum lends out folding chairs so visitors can sit anywhere in the galleries to sketch. I plan to do exactly that, with a particular theme in mind: Athena, and, more specifically, the question of Athena’s sexuality.

So I shall chart my journey through the museum and sketch it out, metaphorically at first but later literally.

Entering through the original, austere, main entrance, I found myself in the large central space confronted by images that reflect a very particular kind of sexuality: the neoclassical nude, the Aphrodite/Venus-like female form. 

Only the other day I heard about a project in Cambridge (at least I think in Cambridge) proposing that nude statues in the city be clothed, in part to challenge the assumption that looking at the naked female body in public space is somehow neutral or unproblematic. That idea came back to me as I stood there.

I began looking around the entrance gallery for Athena, but she was nowhere to be seen. Eventually I looked up. There she was: at the centre of a pediment above one of the doorways leading into the galleries. Over the opposite doorway there was another.

So there you have it: Athena presiding over the threshold. The goddess marking the moment one passes from the entrance space into the galleries beyond - Athena as guardian of culture, perhaps, or at least as the figure who presides over the transition into it.

I entered the gallery through the doorway beneath the Athena to the left. Inside were a range of paintings that I will not go into here. But while I was there I looked up and found something I had been told to look out for by my friend Sarah Hardstaff: Medusa in the ceiling.

There she was, set within a space otherwise occupied by flowers, Medusa herself forming the centre of a floral motif.

Returning to the stairwell through the other Athena doorway, I headed downstairs and found myself in the Greece and Rome Gallery.

While I have been in Cambridge, I have been asking myself some specific questions: what is a god? What is a goddess? And what might the sexuality of a goddess be, specifically in the case of Athena?

I noted that one of the displays in the gallery asks a related question: what does a god look like?

In the discussion after a talk I gave in Cambridge last month as a Lewis-Gibson fellow, one of the comments made was that a goddess is not a woman. But perhaps she can be.

One vase in the gallery shows, according to the caption, a warrior woman fighting a man. The label identifies the warrior woman as Athena. The scene is described as providing one possible answer to the question of what a god looks like. And the answer is: like Athena.

What marks Athena out as divine here is not nudity - far from it - but her many layers of clothing and armour. These attributes signal her identity: helmet, armour, and patterned garments marking her out as a deity. They also make her recognisable. Athena’s divinity is, in a sense, something that can be signalled through costume and attributes.

This also makes her a particularly accessible deity in another sense. One can imagine dressing as Athena and being recognised as such. In ritual contexts something like this could indeed happen: men as well as women might perform roles associated with the goddess: groups of men across different age categories would perform the dances associated with her, the very she dances here as she fights. This is the armed dance, the Pyrrike, first danced as she fought the 'man' she fights here.

As for this 'man'. He is a Giant - like her, a non-human personage: one of those who is seeking to supplant the Olympian gods as cosmic rulers.

As the two figures fight, or perhaps dance, they are flanked by two human figures. This makes me wonder whether the battle for Olympos is being imagined as happening on earth. Perhaps divine time and human time are being blurred here, or perhaps they are existing alongside, or within, one another.

Following the imagery around the vase, there is a large flower to the left of Athena when one faces the scene. It seems to mark some kind of boundary between what is happening here and what appears on the other side of the vase. 

The flower suggests to me the continuing space of Athena’s authority - an aspect of the goddess that may be overlooked. She is, in fact, quite frequently associated with flowers.

Curious about what lay on the other side, beyond the flower. I peered as well as I could but the other side is not on display. So I walked around the vase, to the right of Athena and the giant. Beyond another giant flower, there is a satyr. I can't see what lies beside this figure.

Are we now in a different realm? Something more associated with Dionysus and the world of satyrs and excess? Or is the vase connecting these worlds rather than separating them? It is often tempting to contrast the world of Athena with that of Dionysus, but perhaps the imagery here suggests something more continuous.

At this point I had to leave the café where I had been writing my draft because it was closing. But I want to return briefly as I type it up what might be going on in this scene.

Is this meant to represent an epiphany of Athena at the gigantomachy? If so, perhaps that would explain why Athena and the giant are represented at a larger scale than the humans nearby.

One detail I noticed is that Athena’s helmet breaks the frame at the top of the vase. That might be another indication that something extraordinary is taking place.

I am also intrigued by the cross-shaped decorations on her dress. I have the feeling that I have heard something about such patterns on vases before, though I cannot quite remember what.

Fortunately I will be seeing my friend Tyler Jo Smith next week while she is in Cambridge. As a classical archaeologist, she may well know something about it. I shall ask her.

For now, though, I leave the question open - another small thread in this ongoing exploration of Athena.

I will also research the vase - to find out among other things what is on the other side. And, I plan to say something about the other Athenas I saw in the museum.