The Parthenon’s version of Athena is about to get a wardrobe change that promises to make the 42-foot tall sculpture even more striking. Beginning next month, volunteers will apply an estimated 65,000 leaves of 23.75 karat gold to turn Athena into what historians believe represented the original Greek statue.
“It’s going to be so striking because even when people have never seen Athena and they first walk in there, she is so big,” said Lou Reed, who will oversee the gilding.
“There is so much light going to reflect off of her it is going to be dazzling and almost blinding - especially when they open the doors and let in the outside light,” she said.
Parthenon Patrons, a private nonprofit organization, raised the money to pay for the gilding during a 10-year process that also included a study of what historians believe the real Athena statue in Greece may have looked like.
Workers, who must have no fear of heights, are training for the 12-week job at Reed’s Custom Framing in Madison. Reed will select a handful of specialists from the dozen hopefuls currently taking her classes.
Alongside the team, sculptor Alan LeQuire and his staff will paint the flesh, eyes, jewelry and other parts of the statue to replicate the goddess as authentically as possible.
LeQuire created Athena over an eight-year period. It is the only full-scale recreation of the statue that was sculpted for the Parthenon in Athens around 447 BC.
The original was destroyed approximately 700 years after its creation, according to historians. Nashville’s Athena is the tallest indoor sculpture in the Western world.
“One story is that the enemy went in and melted down the gold and used it.
The other is they tried to put her on a ship and the ship sank,” said Reed.
“We don’t know for sure if she’s at the bottom of the sea somewhere or if she was ground up for the gold.”
Reed is a local specialist in gold leafing and frame restoration as well as the author of A Simple Guide to Gold Leafing.
Reed says the statue, now 10 years old, will first be cleaned and vacuumed from top to bottom. Three coats of shellac will be needed to seal the surface so that it is not porous but workers will be very careful not to spill shellac on the areas to be painted - all of the flesh and jewelry.
The process is labor intensive. A substance called “size” will be applied with brushes a day before the leafing is to be added. The size will take at least 12 hours to dry – more depending on humidity - before the gold leaf can be applied.
To create the mixture, a tube of Indian Red paint is mixed with 7 ounces of size with a palette knife on a piece of glass. The size is also thinned with 10 percent turpentine.
The size is flooded on before the excess is brushed away with a different brush, drying the brush with paper towels during the process.
The gold leafing applied the next day will be transferred from something resembling a coupon book to the area to be leafed with a tool called a gilder’s tip.
“We’re not putting any kind of sealer over the gold because gold is actually prettier without any sealer over it,” Reed said. “A sealer over the gold dulls the shine.”
The leafing process is scheduled to take 12 weeks, but could take an additional six weeks.
LeQuire, assistant Jenny Gill and an international team of scholars have studied drawings from urns and vases to visualize how the mammoth statue may have looked in Greece.
Former Belmont students Patrick Paine and Luke Tidwell, Watkins College of Art and Design graduate Jammie William and volunteer Selena Pike are among the many hopefuls for a summer job of reconstructing history.
“It’s a great opportunity,” said Paine. “It’s a chance to get to do something that nobody else will ever get to do, ever.”
The job will require stamina.
“We plan to start working at 8 a.m. and, as I told everyone here, when we get 40 feet up in the air it is going to be a lot warmer than it is on the floor,” said Reed.
“We’ll be trying to rotate people so they won’t get heat exhaustion up in the air. We’ll try to be sure that everybody stays healthy.”
