The Brooklyn Rail

Visiting the Acropolis Museum

Wounded, mutilated, and dismembered by wars, ancient war sculptures—such as these of heroes of Persian, Trojan wars and embattled mythological gods—are perceived by the Museum visitors as “romantic” ruins of idealized antiquity, rather than as the horrifying forensic evidence of war’s atrocities and as the masterpieces of war art implicated in cultural perpetuation of such atrocities through their aesthetic sanctification of armed violence.