Page 35 - Beholding Liberty!

previous writings. From one point on, antiquity worship would become saturated, as all the ancient monuments that were preserved had been described and depicted. Now, in the spirit of Romanticism, the interest of European visitors to Greece turned decisively to contemporary reality, to the Greeks suffering under Ottoman rule.
Chateaubriand [cat. no I.1.16], on his trip of a few days in 1806 from southern Greece to Jerusalem [cat. no I.1.6], admired the antiquities in turn, but felt shame and disappointment at the decline of living conditions for the modern Greeks.27 His experience was activated when the Greek Revolution broke out, at which point he took action, fighting in the Philhellenic committee of Paris [cat. no II.C.8] and adopting a clear position in favor of the Greek demand [cat. no II.8.C.7].
Similarly in 1810-1811, Lord Byron dedicated less of his time to the antiquities as to the living Greeks, with their passions and sufferings. He himself was certainly inspired by the ancient Greek past, which was why he deplored the plundering of Greek monuments by antiquity hunters such as Lord Elgin, whom he held to public ridicule in his Curse of Minerva [cat. no I.1.9]. At the same time, however, he would turn to the immediate present, when he himself would cultivate lively relations with the Hellenic world [cat. nos I.1.7-8].
Sight-seeing publications illustrated the ever larger, more numerous and more central positions of Greek statues, with their Oriental-type clothing and exotic habits, even as corresponding to those of the western European travellers, to whom they explain their own cultural heritage [cat. no I.1.20] The illustrations of travels to Greece and the albums of travellers such as Edward Dodwell28 [cat. nos I.1.10, I.1.19, 1.2.28], Simone Pomardi,29 François Pouqueville [cat. no I.1.12], and Louis Dupré,30 on the threshold of the Greek Revolution, did not fail, together with the ancient monuments, to draw modern Greek ones as well. Even if they themselves– in contrast with the foreign antiquaries – did not know the history of the monuments with which they are leaving together, the direct and daily contact with them cultivated a protean, at least, historical awareness and feeling of bygone greatness, which in turn prepared the armed demand for their historic future.
This has certainly been founded on the past. At least regarding the view of classicist Europe, modern Greece is regarded solely as a totally fabricated continuation of the ancient one. Even if such a thing
27. Augustinos 2003, 250 ff.
28. Koutsogiannis 2014, 92 cat.
no. 20 and 120 cat. nos 43-44, Lagogianni-Georgakarakos – Koutsogiannis 2019, 392 and 402, cat. nos 21 and 27 respectively.
29. Koutsogiannis 2014, 97 cat. no 27.
30. Koutsogiannis 2014, 101 cat. no. 31, Koutsogiannis 2015, 122-124.
Foreign travellers inspect
the ruins of the temple
of Aphrodite on Kythera, illustration in Antoine-Laurent Castellan, Lettres sur la Morée et les Iles de Cérigo, Hydra et Zante, Paris 1808, Library of the Hellenic Parliament
Antiquity worship as early Philhellenism 35