Under the Light of Helios

In the early days after Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s (1787–1851) invention

became public, opinions on this new medium were divided. While John Ruskin

(1819–1900) described it as ‘the most marvellous invention of the century’,1 some

artists, especially painters, considered photographic images as a serious threat to

their own business.2 Thus, Paul Delaroche (1797–1856), when seeing a

daguerreotype for the first time in 1838, reportedly exclaimed: ‘From today,

painting is dead!’3 Even if this often quoted statement is apocryphal, it reflects the

fear that the new medium rapidly caused by demanding its first casualty, for

miniature painting was quickly replaced by hand-coloured daguerreotypes and

photographs.4 Hence, discussion about photographically generated images and

their relationship towards the fine arts soon revolved around one central issue:

whether a mechanical medium that seems geared only to the reproduction of the

visually perceptible world is part of the fine arts at all, or whether it is only an

industrial device. This is reflected, among other reactions, in the great interest

that some artists showed towards photography.5

One of the first to experiment with the equipment was the history painter

Horace Vernet (1789–1863), who, in 1839, together with Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet

(1817–78), travelled to Cairo and took a daguerreotype camera with him.6 It is not

surprising that Vernet would have been interested in the new medium as he was

Delaroche’s father-in-law, and thus was given ample occasion for being informed

on this new invention because Delaroche was involved in the French Academy’s

report on Daguerre’s invention.7 Some other artists who were interested and

working in the new medium in the first years after it became published were John

Ruskin, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1905), Corot’s Swiss friend Barthélemy

Menn (1815–93), the Bavarian Franz von Kobell (1803–82), Delaroche’s pupil

Charles Nègre (1820–80), Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros (1793–1870), and, of

course, Daguerre himself.8 These are but a few of a much larger host of artists

who, in the early years of photography, worked in the new medium or even turned

completely to it.9 In addition, from the earliest days of photography, it was widely

used by travellers, scholars and amateurs alike to record and document

antiquities and ancient sites such as the remains of the Acropolis of Athens and

its best-known monument, the Parthenon.

In this paper I will present daguerreotypes and early photographs of sculpture

from the Parthenon not only as a medium that was used to record the classical

Under the light of Helios: earlyphotography and the Parthenonsculptures

Marc Fehlmann

161 | Fehlmann: Early photography and the Parthenon sculptures

past for the future, but also as a new form of aesthetic perception that is part of

an enduring trend in visual culture towards a more faithful reproduction of

‘reality’ and the ‘authentic’. Bridging antiquity and the present by means of

verifiable images, the new medium was just another result of nineteenth-century

realism that, as Jonathan Crary showed, ‘preceded the invention of photography

and in no way required photographic procedures or even the development of

mass production techniques’.10 Borrowing from Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s and Crary’s

studies on Romantic visual culture,11 I will argue that the modes of representing

classical sculpture offered by daguerreotypes derived from the output of

reproductive prints and mechanically crafted plaster casts of the same objects,

and that they therefore were part of an ever-increasingly democratic and

collective notion of knowledge and its dissemination.

As the basic framework of early nineteenth-century visual culture, with its

emphasis on verisimilitude, the beginning of mass-production and the pursuit of

scientific ‘truth’ geared towards the democratization of cultural goods and, thus, a

broadened accessibility of images and knowledge, early photography stood at the

same time in stark contrast to the idealized, sentimental notion of a classical –

even fictitious – past. Simultaneously it was fostering the idea of an ‘authentic’

antiquity. By so doing, it helped ensure its survival into the modern world. Even

today, daguerreotypes and early photographs of archaeological sites and antique

works of art perpetuate nostalgic sentiments and the notion of a romantic past, as

the recent exhibition of historic photographs from the Mediterranean world at

the J. P. Getty Museum demonstrated.12 The show provided an evocative setting for

the presentation of an aristocratic and upper-middle-class enclave of wealth and

antiquarianism for whom travelling through ancient lands and collecting classical

antiquities was not threatened by criminal investigation, prosecution and

shame.13 Consequently, even today, the ‘scientific’ disposition fosters sentimental

Hellenism and ideological notions of cultural hegemony and tutelage within the

ongoing debate as to who is the better guardian of Greek and Roman remains.

However, at the time when the daguerreotype entered the world of artists,

researchers, and travellers, it was instrumental in the dissemination of ‘objective’

scientifically correct images of monuments that had to serve either side of the

contradictory concepts of classical antiquity: the sentimental and the real, the

imagined and the empirical, the aesthetic and the political, the heroic and the

materialistic, whether it existed before or not. The nineteenth-century interest in

observation and classification in science and humanities necessitated

documentation that helped to preserve faithful images of monuments and works

of art for posterity. The dissemination of these images to an increasingly

expanding and receptive middle-class audience created the very concept of

classical antiquity still prevailing today, by freezing not only a canon of the most

famous and thus considered the most important monuments, but also by

usurping and extending the very notion of ‘facsimile’ and ‘the real’. The

daguerreotype was one step further in the ancient tradition within the fine arts

that gave copying a fundamental role in the training of artists, while catering for a

constantly growing market for reproductions and imitations of well-known works

of art.

162 | Sculpture Journal 15.2 [2006]

Based on the research done by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) and

perfected by Daguerre, the daguerreotype is an image on a silver-coated copper

plate that has been polished like a mirror and sensitized with iodine vapour

before being exposed in a camera obscura. Exposure times vary from a few

minutes to a whole hour or even more, depending on the light. Together with the

necessary preparatory work this rendered the process of making a daguerreotype

tedious and demanding. Developed by mercury vapours, fixed with a solution of

sodium thiosulphate and washed to remove the residue, it was a time-consuming,

complicated, most problematic process. Furthermore, it could not be counted on

to produce reliable images, as the Swiss-borne Pierre Gustave Gaspard Joly de

Lotbinière (1789–1865), the first daguerreotypist in the Levant, had recorded in his

diaries.14 The result may then appear as a positive or negative depending on the

viewing angle, and as a reversed or correct image, depending on the use of a

correcting lens. However, its greatest disadvantage is the fact that the

daguerreotype produces but one single and rather small image, which was rarely

larger than 16 by 21 centimetres, due to the standardized plate sizes on the market

at the time.15 In other words, daguerreotypes could not be cheaply or easily

multiplied for a broader audience, thus making it a not very efficient tool for

disseminating visual information. If they were to achieve this goal, as in the case

of the first photographic image ever taken of the Parthenon, then they had to be

copied by an engraver and printed on paper (fig. 1).16 De Lotbinière’s daguerreotype

was transferred into an aquatint by Friedrich von Martens (1806–85), a then well-

known reproduction engraver and photographer from Saxony who had worked in

Paris and Lausanne.17 It was included in the greatest contemporary publication using

daguerreotyped images, Excursions daguerriennes, représentant les vues et les


1. Friedrich von Martens(1806–85), after a daguerreotypeby Pierre Gustave Gaspard Joly deLotbinière (1789–1865), TheParthenon from the north-west,1839, 1840/41 aquatint etching,15.2 * 20.3 cm (plate), from Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours’Excursions dagueriennes, Paris,1841. Cologne, Agfa-Foto-Historama im Ludwig-Museum(photo: © Agfa-Foto-Historama,Köln)

nombreux monuments anciens et modernes les plus remarquables du globe by Noël-

Marie Paymal Lerebours (1807–73).18

Despite its many inconveniences, the daguerreotype overtook all other

photographic processes for several years. It certainly helped that its invention was

bought by the French government which, by preventing its being patented, made

it freely accessible to anyone who could afford the necessary equipment: 400

francs, when workmen made 4 francs a day.19 The primary reason, however, for the

vast success that the daguerreotype enjoyed in continental Europe, Canada and

the United States was its pictorial quality, its unvarying objectivity, the crisp

rendering of recorded objects, landscapes and people, ‘the perfection and fidelity

of the picture as such that on examining them by microscopic power, details are

discovered which are not perceivable to the naked eye’.20

This faithful rendering of the tiniest details which, until then, could only be

achieved by skilful but nevertheless subjective draughtsmen and painters, soon

made the daguerreotype an invaluable ally in gaining empirical data in the quest

for ‘scientific truth’ and the ‘authentic’. It became a tool for scientists and

amateurs who were on the lookout for material evidence of the world as it exists,

and not as it ought to exist, according to an idealized system of prevailing

aesthetical and ideological standards. The daguerreotype helped to discover and

record new material or improve existing knowledge. It demonstrated a novel way

of perceiving the world – and became a new means of recording information. And

although modern scientific photography is not the direct descendant of the

daguerreotype, it is its intellectual descendant, ‘because the daguerreotype

demonstrated the implications and pointed the way’.21

Works of art and architectural monuments served as objects for daguerreotypes

from the very beginning. Already in 1839, the new medium was praised for the

many advantages that it might bring to the fine arts and it was considered

a trustworthy memory of all the monuments. It is the incessant,

spontaneous, tireless reproduction of all the landscapes in the universe; of

the hundred thousand masterpieces that Time has overturned or

constructed on the globe’s surface. The daguerreotype will be the

indispensable companion of the traveler who does not know to draw and

the artist who has no time to draw. It is destined to popularize for a trifle the

most beautiful masterpieces of which we have but costly and unfaithful

copies. [. . .] the daguerreotype will serve all the needs of the Arts.22

The first images that Daguerre himself had successfully produced by applying his

own invention were of still-lives with plaster casts, such as the triptych dedicated

to his promoter François Aragon (1786–1853).23 Some of them combine casts of

antique and contemporary sculpture such as in the daguerreotype showing a

reduction of the Roman Crouching Aphrodite from Vienne and Edward Hodges

Baily’s (1788–1867) Eve of 1821.24 That Daguerre liked to use plaster casts as did other

early still-life photographers had mainly to do with their material quality and

status as worthy substitutes of the authentic.25 Already in 1764, Johann Joachim

Winckelmann (1717–68) had praised the beauty of casts made of plaster for their

white surface,26 while in 1781 the French sculptor Etienne Falconnet (1716–91) was

convinced that a plaster cast was aesthetically equal if not even superior to the


original sculpture from which it was taken due to the purity of the white,

homogenous surface.27 The powdery quality of the gypsum that spreads light and

shade in a sfumato effect over a cast’s surface made them welcome models for

early daguerreotypists, although they bore the risk of resulting in monotonous

effects. Daguerre’s assistant Alphonse Eugène Hubert (1797–1842) noted: ‘The

subjects composed totally from white plaster casts [. . .] are much easier to do,

although they become monotonous, often without modulation and without any

effect’.28 In 1841 the architect Charles Chevalier (1804–59) described the advantages

of producing still-lives: ‘Groups of art objects form very gracious images and are

easy to reproduce [. . .] One should choose but the best models, such as the

beautiful specimens by Mr. Hubert and Baron Séguier. The latter gave us one of his

groups that, although it was done a long time ago by the old procedure, still excites

the admiration of artists.’29 Thus, it was only a matter of time before the first

daguerreotype of plaster casts after the Parthenon sculptures was made.

This seems to have happened in Paris in the early 1840s, when an unknown

daguerreotypist took an image of reduced plaster casts from the Parthenon frieze

and their much smaller imitations by John Henning (1771–1851) (fig. 2). The

daguerreotype in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is attributed to Charles

Nègre.30 It shows in the upper part two rows of Henning’s miniature recreations

and below, from left to right, sections from the eastern and western friezes:

plate VII from the east frieze, the so-called plate of the Ergastinai in the Louvre

(E 49–56), a rider adjusting his footwear on the ground from plate VI of the west

frieze in Athens (W 12), and, attached to it, a horseman on a charging horse from

the same plate of the west frieze’s cavalcade in Athens (W 11). Below, split into

single sections, are figures from the east frieze: a standing youth and a bearded

man leaning on a stick from plate VII that includes a group of the eponymous

heroes or Athenian magistrates (E 47, 46), another youth from the same plate

(E 48), followed by a section showing Eros leaning on his mother Aphrodite, again


2. Traditionally attributed toCharles Nègre (1820–81),Interpretations from theParthenon-frieze by John Henning(1771–1851) above two rows ofreduced plaster casts from theParthenon-frieze, c. 1840/42,daguerreotype, 10 * 14 cm(reduced half-plate). Los Angeles,The J. Paul Getty Museum(photo: © Los Angeles, The J. PaulGetty Museum)

from the east frieze, but this time of plate VI (E 42, 43). This group joins the

commander from the cavalcade of the west frieze in Athens (W 15).31

All casts are presented in reverse because the daguerreotypist did not use a

reversing prism for correcting his lens, which would have achieved a laterally

correct image.32 In addition, the lower casts are only about one quarter of the

original size, or roughly 9 inches, as indicated by Henning’s friezes above them.33

Furthermore, they show a restored version of the Parthenon frieze, as indicated

by the Ergastinai, by the long-lost fragment with the Eros from the east frieze and

by the bearded commander from the west frieze. Jean Marcadé and Christiane

Pinatel suspected that the plate of the Ergastinai had been restored by Jean-

Guillaume Moitte (1746–1810) after 1802, while indicating that Bernard Lange

(1754–1839) from Toulouse might have possibly done it from 1818 onwards.34

However, as Karine Spadotto has recently shown, Lange was already part of the

Louvre’s restoration workshop in early 1795, but she does not mention any work

done by him on the Ergastinai.35 In addition, Katharine Eustace has published an

early cast of this same section in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which suggests

that casts of the un-restored Ergastinai must have been available from early on.36

It is still unclear who mutilated them – and when exactly this occurred.

Considering that the French started to produce plaster casts from the Parthenon

sculptures only after having acquired the casts and moulds from Count Choiseul-

Gouffier’s (1752–1817) posthumous sale,37 it seems more likely that the restorations

on the Ergastinai were done after 1818, which of course would have been in line

with the taste and policy of the recently restored Bourbon regime. This is even

more plausible as the section with the Eros that has been lost since the late

eighteenth century is recorded in only one single cast taken between 1786 and

1792 for Count Choiseul-Gouffier. It is this cast that was the starting point for the

reduced version in the daguerreotype.38 However, the bearded commander on the

west frieze (W 15) lost his face between 1802 and 1870, and is recorded only in

Elgin’s casts in the British Museum, which indicates a different source.39 Here, the

reduction must derive from a cast done for Lord Elgin in 1802 in Athens that

together with the marbles was on show in London from 1807. Plaster casts from

the Elgin Marbles were taken in London as early as 1815, when Benjamin Robert

Haydon (1786–1846) was allowed to make moulds from the pieces in Lord Elgin’s

collection.40 Richard Westmacott (1775–1856) started his mould-making for the

British Museum in 1816, after the British government had bought the Elgin

Marbles for the nation together with the moulds taken from pieces left at Athens

by Elgin’s team. The British Museum started to supply complete sets of plaster

casts from the Parthenon sculptures in 1818.41 From this it becomes clear that the

reduced versions of single sections from the Parthenon frieze shown in the

daguerreotype now in the Getty were part of a standardized, one might say

canonized, set of reproductions of antique reliefs produced as artists’ supplies.

Catalogues of such casts were included in the earliest French publications on

daguerreotypes and they were part of an ever-expanding market for copies and

replicas of famous works of art.42

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, plaster casts had received the

aura of the authentic wherever they were put on show. They were treasured


substitutes for the originals which were physically not present and

topographically far apart. Besides the formal identity with their models it was

their ubiquity that ensured their power as facsimiles of classical sculpture in an

alien context. Walter Benjamin’s theory according to which the aura of the

original decreases the more it is mechanically, in this case, photographically,

reproduced43 cannot be applied to an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

beholder of plaster casts, as is evident from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s

enthusiasm for them.44 Furthermore, plaster casts were not just identical

reproductions of an original in any material, but specifically in white, powdery

plaster that, by absorbing the light evenly, reached a quality of timelessness and

the sublime. This was in contrast to the original that often bore traces of age and

ephemerality caused by physical damage, patina and dust.

The much smaller reductions by John Henning had a somewhat similar

function to the plaster casts from the Parthenon frieze in the lower part of the

Getty daguerreotype. These miniature copies – or rather re-interpretations – of

the Parthenon frieze were made between 1812 and 1820, in plaster in sections

measuring two by six inches. Henning sold them in boxed sets.45 They were

considered to be so trustworthy and ‘authentic’ that they were even used as the

models for the reproduction prints of the Parthenon frieze by Paul Delaroche and

Achille Collas (1795–1859), published in 1836 as part of the twenty-volume Trésor

de numismatique et glyptique.46 Hence, the use of reduced plaster casts and

Henning’s miniaturized versions in the Getty daguerreotype reflects not only how

highly the sculptures from the Parthenon were appreciated at the time, but also

how widely spread they had become in the form of mechanically produced plaster

casts.

The craze for plaster casts from the Parthenon marbles reached its peak

shortly before Daguerre’s invention was made public. In 1836 the Minister of the

King of Saxony, Freiherr Ernst Christian August von Gersdorff (1781–1852), asked

the trustees of the British Museum for a complete set of casts from the Elgin

Marbles in exchange for an authentic antique statue of a satyr from the Royal

Collection in Dresden.47 The substitute in plaster of one antique achieved the

same value and, therefore, the same status as an authentic piece. In addition, the

multiplication in plaster of the Parthenon sculptures not only strengthened their

physical presence all over Europe and increased their fame, but it also lifted their

meaning as the ultimate specimen of an authentic Greek antiquity – against the

many Roman copies of Greek statues venerated before the public display of the

Elgin Marbles in London. Consequently, to reproduce casts in a daguerreotype in

the early 1840s was neither more nor less than the logical development of

appreciating replicas for the originals. It was but a technical matter of copying

plaster casts instead of copying them manually by drawing. The daguerreotype in

the Getty is therefore a fine example of the fusion of the authentic with its

facsimile, or even for the substitute’s usurpation of the real. It was thus a

symptom of the slowly growing power that came to determine Western society by

letting the ‘Ersatz’ become a dominant force.

A quite different approach is given with a daguerreotype of the French

diplomat Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros in the Musée d’Orsay. He was one of the


first, since the days of Joly de Lotbinière, to produce

daguerreotypes of ancient Greek monuments. Best

known for his large view of the Great Exhibition,48 and

described by John Wood as ‘perhaps the greatest of the

daguerreotype’s amateurs and one of the most

inspired photographers at any time’,49 Gros had begun

as a painter and, in 1822 and 1831, had exhibited at the

Paris Salon. In 1823 he entered the diplomatic service

of the Bourbons and was sent to Lisbon, Egypt, Mexico

and Bogotá, where he produced daguerreotypes as he

did later of Buenos Aires. In 1850 he was transferred to

Athens to act as mediator between Great Britain and

Greece, where he stayed for two years. There he

produced arguably some of the most beautiful daguerreotypes known of the city

and its ancient monuments. He was then promoted to ambassador in London,

where he served from 1851 to 1863, and from where, in 1857, he was sent to China

and Japan as commissaire extraordinaire, and in 1861 he was awarded the rank of a

Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur.50 Baron Gros served as the first president for

the Société héliographique in Paris, and he was, in 1854, founding member of the

Société française de photographie. He even published his observations on the

daguerreotype,51 while his own photographic work was highly praised in his

lifetime. Thus, when Victor Hugo’s friend Henri de Lacretelle (1815–99) saw some of

Baron Gros’ daguerreotypes in Paris, he was highly impressed by their pictorial

quality and wrote in La Lumière: ‘He [Gros] brought back his whole voyage. If a sun

beam had accompanied him, he got a house by the Nile, a pyramid, the frescoes

[sic] of the Parthenon of Athens of which he defended the integrity while

representing France, as well as he brought back home its monuments as an artist.’52

Baron Gros represents the well-off diplomatic amateur who, like Joseph-

Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804–92), Alphonse-Eugène-Jules Itier (1802–77),

Maxime Du Camp (1822–94) and Félix Teynard (1817–92), started by producing

daguerreotypes on his own initiative and out of pure personal interest.53 It was

Gros who made the earliest known photographic image of a specimen from the

Parthenon in Athens: a section from the north frieze showing plate XXXVI

(N 96–99), which must have been discovered during the clearing operations

under Kyriakos Pittakis (1798–1863) in the 1840s (fig. 3).54 It is, therefore, not a

daguerreotype of a section from the west frieze taken in situ, as Quentin Bajac

claimed,55 but of a piece that had been put inside the Parthenon’s cella together

with other finds from the Acropolis, as recorded by the German art historian

Hermann Hettner (1821–82) a few years before: ‘. . . the frieze on the west side,

however, is still in fair condition in situ, while in addition, there lean several

sections from the frieze, that have been found under the Parthenon’s debris, on

the inner walls of the cella’.56 This also makes sense considering the technical

difficulties encountered by daguerreotypists when taking images of ancient

monuments.57 It would have been quite difficult for Gros to take a picture of the

frieze in situ, as, two generations later, Fred Boissonnas (1858–1946) was able to

do.58 It was these friezes in the archaeologists’ first collecting point on the


3. Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros(1793–1870), Section from theParthenon’s north-frieze: plateXXXVI (N 9–N 99), May/ June1850, daguerreotype, 11 * 15 cm(half-plate). Paris, Musée d’Orsay,gift of Roger Thérond 1985(photo: © RMN/HervéLewandowski)

Acropolis – the Parthenon’s cella – that attracted the attention of various

photographers who came to Athens from the 1850s onwards, and who exchanged

the daguerreotype for albumen paper prints. This new method had descended

from William Henry Fox Talbot’s discovery which allowed the image on a

photographic negative to be reliably reversed into one or more positive prints on

paper. Introduced in 1850, the process of albumen paper prints used thin plain

paper coated with a layer of egg white containing salt, and by allowing the

multiplication of an image this overcame the daguerreotype’s major handicap, its

uniqueness. Baron Gros, having tried the method of salt-prints from wet

collodion-on-glass negatives himself,59 recognized at an early stage that ‘the

daguerreotype has almost run its course, and that its rival on paper is destined by

its indisputable advantages to carry the day against it’.60

One of the early photographers using albumen paper prints was the

Englishman Francis Bedford (1816–94), who, in 1862, accompanied the Prince of

Wales, the future Edward VII, on a trip through the Levant.61 While Baron Gros’

daguerreotype shows only one block from the frieze, Bedford’s albumen print

shows a somewhat strange combination of plates from the north and east frieze

on the marble floor of the ancient temple (fig. 4). The background, however, is

blacked out by having the image negative retouched, in order to obscure the

clumsy brick wall erected to support the ancient ruin.62 This brick wall is shown

on albumen paper prints of the same arrangement by Félix Bonfils (1831–85) in

the Peter and Ruth Herzog Collection (fig. 5).63 The image was taken in 1868 or

1869, 64 and is part of a large collection of photographs bound in two albums, the

largest record of the Athenian Acropolis of such an early date known so far.65 All

three images, the daguerreotype by Gros and the Bedford and Bonfils albumen

paper prints, show the sun shining from the right, indicating that all three images

were taken in the morning before the light became too glaring. Another

photograph in the Herzog album with the number 264 shows again the same

section from the north frieze as in the daguerreotype, but with additional

sections to the left and right (fig. 6). They are not only proof of the attraction the

Parthenon sculptures had for foreign visitors to Athens, but also how it had

become common practice to take photographs of them.


4. Francis Bedford (1816–94),Sections from the Parthenon-frieze: right half of plate II fromthe north-frieze showing a youthwith a sacrifial victim, plate VIfrom the east-frieze showingPoseidon, Apollon and Artemis,and plate VI from the north-friezeshowing one of the Hydriaphoroi,31 May 1862, albumen print, 16.5 * 27.2 cm. The DietmarSiegert Collection, Munich(photo: © Dietmar Siegert, Munich)

By the 1850s and 1860s the sculptures and friezes from the Parthenon were

canonized in Western art theory as works of art that manifest ‘nature’, and hence,

reveal truth.66 They embodied a norm for gauging the standard of ideal beauty

and of progressive civilization and were, and still are, understood as the ultimate

works of antique sculpture from the time of Pericles. Together with the Parthenon

building they exemplified the lasting notion that identified classical antiquity

with Greece, and this antiquity became the Western political ideal because its

supposed moral and aesthetic superiority provided a model for Western societies

and their rulers. Hence too, the debate on returning the Parthenon sculptures in

the British Museum to Greece.67

Within this context, the daguerreotypes and photographs presented here

bear a manifold meaning. The uniqueness and small size of the daguerreotype

‘did not allow easy exchanges among the community of scholars’, which is why

they belonged rather ‘to the genre of the voyage pittoresque’68 than to

collections of scientific data. Yet the replicas of sections from the Parthenon

frieze in the Getty daguerreotype may be read as an anticipation of

merchandising products sold in today’s museum shops and, therefore, as

capitalist demonstrations of a cultivated consumerist taste for absolute fakery

as described by Jean Baudrillard.69 In contrast to this, the images taken from

original sections from the Parthenon frieze in Athens reveal a different notion.

They have the function of art reproductions that follow the tradition of

reproduction prints and drawn copies, but – because of this – they also

provided a corpus of standardized views taken from the same vantage points,

both for the Parthenon sculptures in London as well as those on the Acropolis

of Athens, and for the whole monument. The albumen paper prints provided

the solid basis for scientific research: to systematize sculptures and other works

of art as objects of classification. Image collections offered the groundwork for

plotting the evolution of art and artifacts over time and for integrating them

within their architectural and stratigraphical contexts.70

Photography also made antiquity accessible to a worldwide audience – and

became as such the heir to Montfaucon’s (1655–1741) great pictorial encyclopedia


5. Félix Bonfils (1831–85), Sectionsfrom the Parthenon-frieze: righthalf of plate II from the north-frieze showing a youth with asacrifial victim, plate VI from theeast-frieze showing Poseidon,Apollon and Artemis, and plate VIfrom the north-frieze showing oneof the Hydriaphoroi, 1868/69,albumen print (negative no. 265),20.5 * 26.9 cm. The Peter andRuth Herzog Collection/TheHerzog Foundation, Basel(photo: © The Herzog Foundation,Basel)

6. Félix Bonfils (1831–85), Sections from the Parthenon-frieze: right part of plate VI fromthe North-friez, plate XXXVI, andparts of plate XXII, 1868/69,albumen print (negative no. 264), 21.9 * 28.5 cm. The Peter and RuthHerzog Collection/The HerzogFoundation, Basel(photo: © The Herzog Foundation,Basel)


of antiquity, L’Antiquité expliquée, and Baron d’Hancarville’s (1719–1805)

publication of Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vases.71 It helped establish the history

of art as the science of images (Bildwissenschaft), because photography was

welcomed, at least in Germany, very early on by leading art historians. For

example, Alfred Woltmann (1841–80) and Herman Grimm (1828–1901) placed the

value of the information gained from a photographic reproduction of the 1860s

sometimes higher than that gained from looking at an original.72 Wilhelm Lübke

(1826–93) saw the artistic quality of a photographic reproduction to be equivalent

to the original,73 just as mechanically gained plaster casts of these same originals

had been. And finally, the inimitable Adolph Michaelis (1835–1910), author of the

first encompassing monograph on the Parthenon within a historiographical

perspective, enthusiastically welcomed photographic images of the Periclean

monument and its sculptures sent to him by William James Stillman

(1828–1901).74 Thus, photographs became powerful tools in nurturing common

memory, in creating or defending established moral and aesthetic values, and

inventing myths by shaping not only the image of a classical past, but also the

appropriate ideological framework that was irrevocably bound with it.

I wish to thank the Swiss NationalScience Foundation for providingme with the necessary funds tocomplete this study. Once again, Ifind myself indebted to Dr h. c.Peter Herzog and Dr h. c. RuthHerzog for sharing their expertviews with me. I would also like tothank the Department ofPhotographs at the J. Paul GettyMuseum, Los Angeles, and PaulMartineau for allowing me to studythe daguerreotype attributed toCharles Nègre; Dietmar Siegert forallowing me to publish the albumenpaper print by Francis Bedford;administration and staff of the AgfaHistorama in the Ludwig Museum,Cologne, for figure 1; PD DrDorothea Ritter, University ofHildesheim, for her valuableassistance; Dr Britta Tøndborg,Keeper of the Royal Cast Collection,The Statens Museum for Kunst,Copenhagen, for her help on earlycasts of the Parthenon sculptures in Copenhagen, and finally, Richard Melville Ballerand who was a helpfully astute criticalreader.

1 E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn(eds), The Works of John Ruskin, 39vols, London, 1903–12, vol. 3, p. 210.On Ruskin’s stance towards thedaguerreotype in general see H.Birchall, ‘Contrasting vision: Ruskin –the daguerreotype and the photo-graph’, Living Pictures. The Journal ofthe Popular and Projected Imagebefore 1914, vol. 2, 1, 2003, pp. 3–20.

2 On the early reception of thedaguerreotype see D. Planchon-deFont-Réaulx, ‘Splendeurs et mystèresde la chambre noire’, in Q. Bajac and

D. Planchon-de Font-Réaulx (eds), Ledaguerreotype français. Un objet photographique (exh. cat.), Muséed’Orsay, Paris, 2003, pp. 55–71.

3 Paul Delaroche, quoted in G. Tissandier, Les merveilles de la photographie, Paris, 1874, p. 64; See H. and A. Gerson, L. J. M. Daguerre. The History of the Diorama and theDaguerreotype, New York, 1968, p. 95.Stephen Bann suggests that this firstnegative remark might well be apoc-ryphal: S. Bann, Paul Delaroche,History Painter, London, 1997, p. 277,note 23. See also D. Planchon-de Font-Réaulx in Bajac and Planchon-deFont-Réaulx, as at note 3, p. 61, 71 note10.

4 L. Schaaf, Art and Photography,London. 1968, pp. 21–24.

5 Ibid., pp. 108–12. 6 F. Goupil-Fesquet (ed.), Voyage d’

Horace Vernet en Orient, Paris, 1843; N. Perez, Focus East: Early photogra-phy in the Near East (1839–1885),Jerusalem/ New York, 1988, p. 229; S. Morand, ‘Le daguerreotype enprovince, une histoire sans fin’, inBajac and Planchon-de Font-Réaulx,as at note 3, p. 106. See also E. Bertin,‘Les sources françaises de l’histoiredes premiers pas du daguerréotypeen Egypte (1839) et à Malte (1840)’, at www.latribunedelart.com/Bertin_Daguerreotype.htm(27/02/2006).

7 H. Delaroche-Vernet, Recherchesgénéalogiques sur Horace Vernet, PaulDelaroche et leur famille, Paris 1907.On Delaroche’s evidence see Gerson,as at note 3, pp. 81, 92.

8 Gerson, as at note 3, pp. 3–47; J.Wood, The Scenic Daguerreotype.Romanticism and Early Photography,

Iowa, 1995, pp. 14–22; C. Pinson,‘Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé’, inSauer Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon.Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeitenund Völker, vol. 23, Munich/ Leipzig.1999, pp. 398–99.

9 See A. Hamber, ‘Photography ofworks of art’, in K. and J. Jacobson(eds), Étude d’après Nature. 19thCentury Photographs in Relation toArt, Petches Bridge, 1996, pp. 114–19.

10 J. Crary, Techniques of theObserver. On Vision and Modernity inthe Nineteenth Century, Cambridge,MA/ London. 1990, p. 17.

11 Ibid.; Crary situates photogra-phy in a history of seeing and not just as a material in the evolution oftechnology and pictorial arts, while G. D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real.Romanticism and Visual Culture,1760–1860, New York, 2001, uncoversan ideologically grounded reaction of shock, disenchantment and disgust directed towards ‘reality’ andits simulations.

12 Antiquity & Photography. EarlyViews of Ancient Mediterranean Sites,exhibition held at the Getty Villa,Malibu from January 28 to May 12006.

13 See for this the pioneering studyby C. P. Bracken, Antiquities Acquired:The Spoliation of Greece, NewtonAbbot. 1975. See also R. Eisner,Travellers to an Antique Land. TheHistory and Literature of Travel toGreece, Ann Arbor, 1991, who, on pp. 91, 94 and elsewhere, recountssome typical incidents of ‘Western’behaviour in Greece. See also B. R.Haydon’s note on ‘the English trav-ellers [who] with their natural lovefor little bits, broke off arms or noses

to bring home as relics’, in M Elwin(ed.), The Autobiography and Journalsof Benjamin Robert Haydon(1786–1846), London, 1950, p. 242.

14 E. Brown, ‘Les premières imagespar daguerréotype au monde – le pho-tographe canadien Pierre GustaveGaspard Joly de Lotbinière’,L’Archiviste, 118, 1999, pp. 23–29.

15 A. Gunthert, ‘La boîte noire deDaguerre’, in Bajac and Planchon-deFont-Réaulx, as at note 2, pp. 33–40.

16 On Joly de Lotbinière see Brown,as at note 14, and M. Fehlmann, ‘PierreGustave Gaspard Joly de Lotbinière(1798–1865)’, in M. Jorio (ed.),Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse,vol. 6 (German edition), vol. 7, (Frenchand Italian editions), Basel/Hauterive/Locarno, to be publishedrespectively in fall 2006 and 2007. In reproducing daguerreotypes see M. S. Barger and W. B. White, TheDaguerreotype. Nineteenth-centuryTechnology and Modern Science,Washington/London, 1991, pp. 42–43.

17 There is not much informationon von Martens who, during the1850s, had stayed in Lausanne andwho, among others, reproduced awork by Eugène Delacroix (entry inDelacroix’ journal of 5 June 1847). SeeBajac and Planchon-de Font-Réaulx,as at note 2, pp. 227–30, no. 136, and D. Girardin, in Jorio, as at note 17, vol. 8 (to appear in fall 2008).

18 Paris: Rittner & Goupil,Bossange, 1841–1842. On Lerebourssee J. E. Buerger, FrenchDaguerreotypes, Chicago/London,1989, pp. 27–29, and H. Yiakoumis,L’Acropole d’Athènes. Photographies1839–1959, Paris/ Athens, 2000, pp. 13–15, 123.


19 Gerson, as at note 3, pp. 86–97.The price of the equipment is takenfrom the catalogue of N.-M. P.Lerebours on the last page of Ch.Chevalier, Nouvelles Instructions surl’usage du Daguerréorype, Paris, 1841,s. p.

20 Sir John Robinson, ‘Notes onDaguerre’s photography’, TheEdinburgh New Philosophical Journal,July 1839, p. 838, quoted in Gerson, asat note 3, p. 88.

21 Barger and White, as at note 16,p. 218.

22 J. Janin, ‘Le Daguerotype [sic]’,l’Artiste, 1839, s. p.: ‘c’est la mémoirefidèle de tout les monuments. De tousles paysages de l’univers; c’est lareproduction incessante, spontanée,infatigable. Des cent mille chefs-d’œuvre que le temps a renversés ouconstruits sur la surface du globe. LeDaguerotype sera le compagnonindispensable du voyageur qui ne saitpas dessiner, et de l’artiste qui n’a pasle temps de dessiner. Il est destiné àpopulariser chez nous, et à peu defrais, les plus belles œuvres des artsdont nous n’avons que des copies coûteuses et infidèles; [. . .] leDaguerotype suffira à tous les besoinsdes arts.’

23 Bajac and Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, as at note 2, p. 58, fig. 2, pp. 149–54, nos 28–33.

24 Ibid., p. 150, no. 29.25 e.g. François-Alphonse Fortier

(1825–82), Baron Armand PierreSéguier (1803–76), Alphonse EugèneHubert (1797–1842).

26 J. J. Winckelmann, Geschichteder Kunst des Alterthums, Dresden,1764, pp. 147–48, 2nd edn Vienna, 1776,p. 257 (reprint edited by A. H. Borbeinet al., Johann Joachim Winckelmann,Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums,Johann Joachim WinckelmannSchriften und Nachlass vol IV, 1,Mainz, 2002, p. 249).

27 É.-M. Falconet, Œuvres, vol. 1,Lausanne 1781, pp. 271 and 314–15.

28 A. E. Hubert, Le Daguerréotypeconsidéré sous un point de vue artis-tique, mécanique et pittoresque, Paris,1840, here quoted from the reprint ed.J.-M. Place, Paris, 1987, p. 25: ‘Les sujetscomposés entièrement de plâtresblanches [. . .] sont plus facile à faire,mais ils deviennent monotones, sou-vent sans modelés et sans effets.’

29 C. Chevalier, NouvellesInstructions sur l’usage duDaguerréotype. Description d’un nou-veau photographe . . ., Paris, 1841, p. 49: ‘Les groupes d’objets d’art for-ment des tableaux très gracieux etsont facile à réproduire. [. . .] On nesaurait choisir de meilleurs modèlesen ce genre, que les belles épreuves deM. Hubert et du Baron Séguier. Cedernier a bien voulu nous donner unde ses groupes qui, bien qu’éxécuté

depuis fort longtemps et par lesanciens procédéés, excite toujoursl’admiration des artistes.’

30 Los Angeles, J. Paul GettyMuseum, inv. 97.XT.11.

31 E VII, 49–56: Paris, Louvre Ma738; West VI, 11–12: Athens, until 1993in situ; E VI, 46–48: London, BritishMuseum Br 119f; Athens, AkropolisMuseum 1265 and lost; Athens, until1993 in situ.

32 On reversing prisms see Bargerand White, as at note 16, p. 43.

33 About 22.9 cm in comparisonwith 99 cm for the original height ofthe frieze. See I. Jenkins, TheParthenon Frieze, London, 1994, p. 10.On Henning see J. Malden, JohnHenning (1771–1851), ‘. . . a very inge-nous modeller’, exh. cat. PaisleyDistrict Council Museum and ArtGalleries, Paisley, 1977, and D. Willers,‘Die gar nicht spontane Begegnung:oder jeder hat den Parthenon, den erverdient’, in M. Svilar and S. Kunze(eds), Antike und europäische Welt,Bern/ Frankfurt/ New York, 1984, pp. 145–85, especially pp. 161–68.

34 J. Marcadé and C. Pinatel, ‘Lesavatars de la plaque des Ergastines duLouvre au XIXe siècle’, in E. Berger(ed.), Parthenon-Kongress Basel.Referate und Berichte 4.–8. April 1982, 2 vols, Mainz 1984, vol. 1, pp. 338–457.

35 K. Spadotto, ‘Bernard Lange, unsculpteur au destin particulier’,Bulletin Archéologique du comité destravaux historiques et scientifiquesMoyen Âge, Renaissance, Temps mod-ernes, 31–32, 2005, pp. 153–88.

36 K. Eustace, Canova. Ideal Heads,Oxford, 1997, p. 111 (cat. no. 13).

37 On Choiseul-Gouffier(1752–1817) see E. Gran-Aymerich,Dictionnaire biographique d’archéolo-gie, Paris. 2001, pp. 174–75. On theearly production and sale of castsfrom the Louvre see E. W. Ehrhardt,Das Akademische Kunstmuseum derUniversität Bonn unter der Direktionvon Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker undOtto Jahn, Opladen. 1982, pp. 24–25.The casts in Bonn belong togetherwith those in Copenhagen to the old-est casts of the Parthenon sculpturesstill extant and provided by theLouvre. I owe this information to DrBritta Tøndborg, Keeper of the RoyalCast Collection, The Statens Museumfor Kunst, Copenhagen.

38 E. Berger and M. Gisler-Huwiler,Der Parthenon in Basel. Dokumentezum Fries, Mainz, 1996, p. 162.

39 Ibid., pp. 48–49. 40 Elwin, as at note 13, pp. 262–63.41 I. Jenkins, ‘Acquisition and

supply of casts of the Parthenonsculptures by the British Museum,1835–1939’, The Annual of the British School at Athens, 85, 1990, pp. 101–03.

42 See Catalogue des Sculptures,éditées par MM. Susse frères, attachedto L.-J.-M. Daguerre, Historique etDescription des procödés du daguer-réotype et du Diorama, Paris, 1839, following p. 79.

43 W. Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk imZeitalter seiner technischenReproduzierbarkeit’, inIlluminationen. AusgewählteSchriften, Frankfurt, 1961, pp. 148–84.

44 J. Traeger, ‘Zur Rolle derGipsabgüsse in Goethe’s ItalienischenReise’, in H. Wiegel (ed.),Italiensehnsucht. KunsthistorischeAspekte eines Topos, Munich/Berlin,2004, pp. 45–57.

45 Malden, as at note 33, pp. 11–12. 46 P. Delaroche et al. (eds), Bas-

Reliefs du Parthénon et du Temple dePhigalie disposés suivant l’ordre de lacomposition originale et gravés par lesprocedes de M. Achille Collas, etc.,Paris, 1836 (2nd edn 1860).

47 Jenkins, as at note 41, 104. Seealso Knoll, Das Albertinum vor 100Jahren – Die SkulpturensammlungGeorg Treus, exh. cat. StaatlicheKunstsammlungen Dresden 1994,Dresden, 1994, p. 39 note 3, and p. 44.

48 M. Frizot (ed.), Nouvelle Histoirede la Photographie, Paris, 1996, p. 57.

49 J. Wood, The ScenicDaguerreotype. Romanticism andEarly Photography, Iowa, 1995, p. 36.

50 For Gros see Hoefer (ed.),Nouvelle Biographie Générale, 46 vols,Paris 1852–66, vol. 22 (1858), pp. 170–71, and F. Wey, ‘De l’Influencede l’Héliographie sur les Beaux-Arts’,La Lumière, 1e année, no.1, 9 février1851, pp. 2–3.

51 Baron Gros, ‘Chambre obscureblanche à l’intérier’, La Lumière, no. 2,16 février 1850, pp. 5–6, La Lumière,no. 3, 23. février 1851, p. 9 (suite).

52 H. de Lacretelle in La Lumière,no. 10, 28 février 1852, p. 37 (transla-tion by the author).

53 Bajac and Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, as at note 3, pp. 33–40.

54 North frieze plate XXXVI;Athens, Akropolis Museum 862. Forrestorations by Pittakis see R.Economakis, Acropolis Restoration.The CCAM Interventions, London,1994, p. 72.

55 Bajac and Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, as at note 3, p. 349, No. 288.

56 H. Hettner, GriechischeReiseskizzen, Braunschweig, 1853, p. 121 (translation by the author).Hettner, a correspondent of the Swisswriter Gottfried Keller (1819–90), hadbeen travelling in the Mediterraneanfrom 1845 to 1848.

57 See Chevalier, as at note 29, p. 47.

58 Boissonnas’ images were published in Maxime Collignon’sseminal monograph Le Parthénon,Paris, 1914.

59 Baron Gros in La Lumière, no.22, 23 May 1853, p. 88.

60 Baron Gros, Quelques notes surla photographie, Paris, 1850, quoted inGerson, as at note 3, p. 122.

61 F. Bedford, Photographic Picturesmade by Mr. Francis Bedford duringthe Tour in the East, on which . . . heaccompanied H.R.H. the Prince ofWales, 1863 (4 vols), London, 1863.

62 On the restoration method withbricks under Pittakis see Economakis,as at note 54, pp. 72–73, 77.

63 Yiakoumis, as at note 18, p. 235(lower image).

64 With negative number 265.65 The two albums contain 168

albumen paper prints before the titleswere added, but with the signatureand numbering of the negative num-bers on them.

66 See J. Whale, ‘Sacred objects andthe sublime ruins of art’, in St. Copleyand J. Whale, Beyond Romanticism.New Approaches to Texts and Contexts1780–1832, London/New York, 1992,pp. 218–36, p. 224. See also R. Gurstein,‘The Elgin Marbles. Romanticism andthe waning of “ideal beauty”’,Daedalus, Fall 2002, pp. 88–100.

67 The first formal request toreturn the Elgin Marbles to Greecewas made to the Trustees of theBritish Museum in 1835; Jenkins, as atnote 41, p. 106 n. 146.

68 C. L. Lyons, ‘The art and scienceof antiquity in ninenteenth-centuryphotography’, in C. L. Lyons et al.,Antiquity & Photography. Early Viewsof Ancient Mediterranean Sites (exh.cat.), The J. Paul Getty Museum, LosAngeles, 2006, p. 33.

69 J. Baudrillard, ‘The processionof simulacra’, in B. Wallis, Art afterModernism: RethinkingRepresentation, New York, Museum ofCoontemporary Art, 1984, pp. 253–81.

70 C. L. Lyons, ‘Photogenic frag-ments’, in Lyons, as at note 68, p. 65.

71 Berenard de Montfaucon,L’antiquité expliquée et representée en figures . . ., 10 vols, Paris, 1719–22; P. F. Hugues, Baron d’Hancarville,Antiquités Grêcques, Etrusques etRomaines tirées du cabinet de SirWilliam Hamilton . . ., 4 vols, Naples,1766.

72 A. Woltmann, ‘Die Photographieim Dienste der Kunstgeschichte’,Deutsche Jahrbücher für Politik undLiteratur, vol. 10, 1864, pp. 355–64;H. Grimm, Über Künstler undKunstwerke, vol. 1, Berlin, 1865, p. 38.

73 W. Lübke, ‘Photographien nachGemälden des Louvre, herausgegebenvon der photographischenGesellschaft in Berlin’, Kunst-Chronik,vol. 5, 1870, pp. 45–46.

74 A. Szegedy-Maszak, ‘AnAmerican on the Acropolis: WilliamJames Stillman’, in Lyons, as at note68, p. 193.

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