Art: Earth Mother

Three years after Lord Byron died at Missolonghi muttering “Courage!” to imagined troops, the romantic Greek rebellion against the Turks still flickered in Attica, still held the sympathies of many a U. S. and English citizen. On July 19, 1827, for instance, the U. S. frigate Constitution anchored in the Straits of Salamis and quietly and unofficially sent ashore a boatload of provisions to Greek revolutionaries hiding on the small island of Psyttaleia. Before Commodore Daniel Todd Patterson could sail away, however, he was persuaded by the Greeks to buy a huge mutilated statue of great antiquity which had been buried inland and whose five tons of bulk gave Old Ironsides’ grumbling sailors no end of trouble. But Hellenistic Commodore Patterson brought his statue safely home, presented it to the flourishing young Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. For more than 40 years it stood in the Academy’s courtyard at Tenth and Chestnut Streets under ”the largest hawthorn tree in America.”

Since 1876. Psyttaleia’s headless Ceres has occupied a niche over the main entrance of the Academy’s later building at Broad and Cherry Streets. To the sculptor who hewed and chiseled her broad figure in the time of Praxiteles, she represented not Roman Ceres but GreekDemeter, “earth mother,” goddess of fertility, mother of Persephone whom Pluto carried off to the underworld. One of the few pieces of ancient Greek sculpture which have been left outdoors sincediscovery, Ceres has been getting blacker every year in Philadelphia’s smoky air, has finally begun to crumble. To protect passersby, Academy President Alfred G. B. Steel last week had scaffolding put up around her and asked the advice of sculptors on ways of preserving her weathered marble.