April 12, 1996
NEW YORK (AP) - Ellen Schraudolph, curator-scientific collaborator at Berlin's Pergamon Museum, came to this country for the first showings of the newly restored Telephos frieze, one of the Berlin museum's treasures.
On a tour of the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she talked about what researchers have pieced together of the early history of the frieze, which decorated inner walls of Pergamon's Great Altar.
"We actually think it's doubtful the altar was ever used for sacrifice," she said. "It's very hard to climb up those steep steps; it would be difficult to get a cow, say, up there to sacrifice."
The Berlin museum's partial reconstruction of the altar is closed for renovation. But the completion of restoration work on the frieze panels meant they could be presented in a traveling exhibition.
"We know the frieze was worked by a team of sculptors," Schraudolph said. "It's very difficult to say how many or how they did it, but they must have been numerous to get it done in time."
Scholars can identify some of the work of individual hands that contributed to the task, she said. "Parts of the frieze show us the work was divided up among them."
And there are color traces left, she said, evidence that the "classical" purity of stones bleached by time's passing that's so familiar to us was not at all what the ancients saw.
"We have to imagine everything was painted, even colored rather heavily for our tastes," she said, though most of the color has disappeared now.
The frieze could have taken 20 years to make, at least 10, Schraudolph said. And it was never completely finished.
"You can observe a lot of nice things on this frieze about the way it was worked," she said, especially on the unfinished areas. "You can see all sorts of marks of the tools they used, where they used instruments with teeth, rough textures that should have been polished."
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