A Note to the reader:
I will be publishing exceptional content from other contributors occasionally. A British Florence-based art critic writing under the name of Peter Oliver sent me this gorgeous article.
I wish modern Muslims were as tolerant of representational beauty as some of their ancestors were. But, alas. In any case, I hope my readers learn, as I have, how rich, poignant, and surprisingly entertaining art history can be!
-Ayaan
Art can be a disappearing act. An object can disappear into a private collection, or be snapped up by an overseas buyer. Some art is temporary by design, or at least only temporarily on display, like the “Fourth Plinth” sculptures on London’s Trafalgar Square. Sometimes art goes for political reasons: America was divided and transfixed first by the removal, then the destruction, of the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee, which, until recently, stood in a public park in Charlottesville. The iconoclastic impulse is ancient, perhaps always symbiotic with the making of public images – the Golden Calf from Exodus comes and goes in that sacred story retold through the generations.
Beautiful, meaningful, extraordinary objects might be inanimate, but they are as mortal as we are. They are disappeared, destroyed, or lost for an almost infinite number of reasons, by myriad means. They vanish at moments of catastrophic upheaval, or by the most mundane wear and tear. Nothing lasts forever, but curious and cultured people might wonder why, when, and how great works of art disappear from our world. It’s good – it’s necessary – to have an idea of how fragile things can be, to have some idea of what the world loses to the predations of thieves, fanatics, incompetents, or revolutionaries.
Some years ago, the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, produced a radio show “A History of the World in 100 Objects.” The whole human story told in a century of physical items from the British Museum’s almost impossibly huge collections. (If you’re interested, there’s a companion book, and a somewhat more dated archived website).
It’s possible to imagine, though, the dark side to MacGregor’s schema. You could tell a whole history of mankind – heartbreaking and exhilarating – through destroyed or disappeared objects. This little article is not quite that story, but it is a taste of what that could be. Here are eight of mankind’s vanished creations worth remembering. You will have heard of some before, and others may be new to you.
1. The Sculptures of Phidias.
Of the traditional ‘Seven Wonders’ of the ancient world, only the Great Pyramid at Giza still stands. One of the six that fell was the gigantic sacred sculpture of Zeus, which stood in his temple at Olympia in Greece. Standing at around forty feet, the statue was the work of Ancient Greece’s most famous sculptor, Phidias. The statue was chryselephanitine – that is, made of gold and ivory – being immensely valuable, and requiring regular maintenance.
The Greco-Roman travel writer Pausanias describes the statue in detail. He notes, for example, that the god’s robe is decorated with the likenesses of animals and lily flowers. Two details from Pausanias are particularly touching. First, he says that the statue’s great size has been measured, but refuses to tell his reader quite how big it is; he fears a measurement alone wouldn’t do it justice. Seeing is believing! Second, he relates a story that Phidias prayed to Zeus for a sign that the god approved of his sculpture. Straight away, he says, a divine lightning bolt struck the paved floor in thunderous appreciation. Today, he says, the resulting damage is covered up by a bronze jar!
Another of Phidias’s great chryselephantine sculptures was that Athene Parthenos (“Athena the Virgin”), which stood in the Parthenon temple on the Athenian acropolis. Athens’ great temples had been destroyed when the Persians sacked the city in 480 BC, but in one of the ancient world’s great acts of restoration, Athens, under the leadership of the charismatic populist Pericles, rebuilt the acropolis’s sacred sanctuaries in the middle of the fifth century BC. The statue was – unusually – not itself an object of worship. Athene’s proper cult image, the statue of Athene Polias, was housed in another temple on the Acropolis. Instead, Phidias’s sculpture was a votive: a sign of thanksgiving to the goddess. The Parthenon temple may have been a kind of emergency sacred treasury, whose golden decorative elements could be melted down at times of national crisis.
Phidias’s statues were nevertheless wonders of classical Greek art, and stood for centuries. Historians debate exactly how and when they disappeared. Some historical traditions suggest that the statue of Zeus at Olympia was transported to adorn the refounded city of Constantinople when the Roman emperors made it their capital, and the new center of the Greco-Roman world, in the fourth century AD. Alternatively, the statues at both Olympia and Athens might have been victims of the formal Christianization of the empire in the 390s AD, when the Christian Emperor Theodosius I formally outlawed the old pagan cults of Rome’s subject peoples.
Thankfully, if controversially, some of the Parthenon’s most famous sculpture remains preserved today at the British Museum: the Elgin Marbles. Other important survivals may be seen at the excellent new Acropolis Museum in Athens itself. The Parthenon, of course, underwent various reincarnations. It served for many centuries as a cathedral church, its dedication switching from the virgin goddess Athena to the Virgin Mary. After the Turkish conquest of Greece, it was somewhat predictably turned into a mosque. Perhaps less predictably, the Turks later used this mosque as a gunpowder magazine in wartime. The rest, well, is history.
2. The Library of Alexandria.
Moving to the realm of literature, any overview of mankind’s lost masterpieces has to include the Library of Alexandria. Likely dating from the early years of third century BC, it may be that initial plans for a great cultural institution in the newly founded Greco-Egyptian city of Alexandria were laid by King Ptolemy I, who had been one of Alexander the Great’s world-conquering generals, and who deftly installed himself as a Greek-speaking Pharaoh over Egypt when Alexander’s empire fell apart upon his untimely death.
The library formed part of the Museion, an institution dedicated to the Muses. The Museion was led by a priest and patronized by the King, but compromised a community of scholars who owned property together and maintained a common life. Together they studied, translated, and commented upon great literature. Homer was the central author. The last known librarian at the Mouseion, Aristarchos of Samothrace, was Antiquity’s great Homeric critic, deleting sub-par lines in the Iliad and the Odyssey where considerations of Greek style and meter made it impossible to recognize them as part of the original masterpiece. This was expert nitpicking raised to an artform.
Ptolemaic Alexandria was not simply a repository of Greek texts, to be enjoyed by these Greeks living outside their ancestral homelands, the way some pre-woke-era American WASPs seemed to out-English the English in their devotion to Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. The Ptolemies commanded Egyptian priests to deposit copies of ancient Egyptian texts in the Museion. The Egyptian priest Manetho produced a history of Egypt – the Aegyptiaca – drawing on native sources, but written in Greek. Manetho preserved lists of ancient Egyptian kings, occasionally attempting to synchronize with figures known to Greek history or epic poetry. He attempted, for example, to identify the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep with Memnon, the Aethiopian hero of the Trojan War.
As with other ancient wonders, it is hard to be certain how the Library at Alexandria met its end. But the greatest damage to it was done by a fire started by Julius Caesar’s Roman soldiers in 48 BC. Caesar was in Alexandria supporting Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra) in a petty civil war against her younger brother Ptolemy XIII (the Ptolemaic dynasty was not remotely imaginative with names). Caesar had decided to burn his enemies’ ships in the Alexandrian harbor, only to lose control of the fire, which spread quickly through the city to the Library. A century later, the Roman philosopher Seneca estimated that forty thousand painstakingly hand-copied books had perished in the fire.
The loss of the Alexandrian Library is not just a loss in itself. It stands for the loss of the majority of the ancient world’s literature, as over the years the great libraries of the ancient world succumbed to fire, thievery, cultural collapses of various kinds, a religious winnowing of much pagan literature, and the slower predations of decay, poor maintenance, and hungry philistine rodents. What survives is largely thanks, paradoxically, to those otherworldly, fanatic Christians of Late Antiquity–Latin, Greek, Middle Eastern – who retreated to lives of study and prayer in monasteries as the ancient world collapsed, preserving the survivors of ancient literature we know as the Classics. The monasteries, in what earlier generations polemically labeled “the Dark Ages,” show how motivated, intentional communities can preserve precious cultural goods in service of an higher end, awaiting those cycles of renaissance and restoration which from time to time allow us to revitalize a long-neglected inheritance.
3. Madinat al-Zahra.
A little more than two hundred years after Muslim armies from North Africa conquered the weakened, bitterly divided Visigothic kingdom of Spain, the Emir of Córdoba proclaimed himself Caliph. Abd al-Rahman III (890-961) governed al-Andalus (Spain) and parts of North Africa. He ruled over a mixed population of Arabs, Berbers and natives; Muslims, Christians and Jews.
Abd al-Rahman’s Islamic state has been much contested in recent history writing. In the wake of 9/11 and war in the Middle East, Yale’s María Rosa Menocal argued that Muslim Spain was “the ornament of the world,” a flourishing society of tolerance. A strident rejoinder, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise was published in 2016 by Dario Fernández-Morera; its title well reflects his counterargument. In the last few years, Brian Catlos’s Kingdoms of Faith has provided a helpful overview of Muslim-dominated Spain’s messy realities between these more polemical portraits.
There is little debate, though, about Abd al-Rahman’s astonishing architectural achievement: the Madinat al-Zahra. Located four miles outside the Caliphate’s capital city Córdoba, in southern Spain, the Madinat al-Zahra (“the radiant city”) was halfway between a palace and a city in its own right. It contained the Caliph’s residence, a harem, his chancery, his treasury, a splendid congregational mosque, and accommodation for thousands of civil servants, courtiers, visiting foreigners, and slaves. The Caliph reused thousands of columns from Roman sites across Spain, kept a dazzling pool of liquid mercury in one reception hall to stun his guests, and surrounded his palaces with paradisiacal formal gardens.
The Madinat al-Zahra was further beautified by Abd al-Rahman’s cultured heir, al-Hakam II. The more scholarly successor assembled a magnificent caliphal library, and further ornamented the gardens with recovered Roman sculptures and sarcophagi. Other country mansions for the Córdoban elite grew up in the Guadalquivir valley, like the villa al-Rummaniyya of al-Hakam II’s treasurer. Eventually they were joined by the rival palace-town of a usurping minister, al-Mansur (known still to Spaniards as Almanzor), named in an act of copycat arrogance “Madinat al-Zahira.”
Little of the Madinat al-Zahra remains today, painstakingly uncovered and partially restored by twentieth and twenty-first century archaeologists. Al-Mansur, both a lethal machiavellian intriguer and an all-conquering general, ruled in all but name, having functionally dispossessed the third Caliph of Córdoba, al-Hisham II. Over time, al-Mansur came to rely more and more on an imported soldiery: North African Berbers, mercenaries from overseas, and slaves. To curry favor with more fundamentalist Islamic clerics, al-Mansur purged the caliphal library of non-Islamic texts. The Madinat al-Zahra was sidelined.
It was the fratricidal politicking of al-Mansur’s sons which brought the caliphate to its knees, as Arab, Berber, and Slavic slave armies sought to seize power in the ineffectual al-Hisham’s name, or that of various pretenders. As the state collapsed, the Madinat al-Zahra was plundered. Clerics and warlords seized power in the provincial cities, as Córdoba descended into urban civil war. Ultimately, the capital’s radicalized, quasi-republican citizens ejected the last, sad remnants of the Umayyad royal family.
Brian Catlos summarizes: “After twenty-two years of civil war and ethnic strife, of countercoups and pogroms, compounded by flooding and pestilence, Córdoba had been shattered. So thoroughly were its great palaces destroyed that the ruins of Madinat al-Zahra were not identified until 1843; the site of Madinat al-Zahira has still not been located.”
4. The Church of the Holy Apostles, Constantinople.
From one end of the Mediterranean to the other! While modern Istanbul is best known for the Hagia Sophia – the City’s original cathedral, turned into a mosque after its conquest by Islam’s holy warriors in 1453 – Constantinople contained another great church of world historical importance.
Founded originally by Constantine the Great, and rebuilt (like the Hagia Sophia) by the sixth-century emperor Justinian, the Church of the Holy Apostles stood on a hill in the center of the imperial city. The great domed church was dedicated to all twelve of Christ’s Apostles, with Constantine envisaging that relics of all the Twelve would eventually be venerated under a single roof. The church also functioned as the final resting place of many of the city’s emperors and patriarchs, from Constantine onwards. Its treasures further included relics of the Church Fathers and, supposedly, the pillar at which Christ was flogged.
We know the church now primarily from literature. One of our best sources is a long descriptive poem, written by Constantine of Rhodes in the tenth century AD. The poet describes its interior decoration of “panels and carved marbles” depicting “luxuriant grape clusters,” “sweet-smelling flowers,” and “well-shaped fruits.” He describes mosaics of “Christ depicted as the sun.” of “the undefiled Virgin like the moon,” and “like the stars, the wise Apostles.”
The church was first seriously despoiled when Constantinople was taken, in one of Christian Europe’s most tragic betrayals, by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The emperors’ tombs were robbed of their ornaments, and sarcophagi broken into for the sake of stealing crowns and jewels within. Much of the loot ended up in Venice. It is an irony that the famous, many-domed St Mark’s Basilica in Venice is thought to be modeled upon the Church of the Apostles.
Worse, though, was to be inflicted by the Turks. When Mehmet the Conqueror’s Muslim armies seized Constantinople in 1453, and ejected the Greek Christians from their cathedral, the Patriarch took up residence for a few years at the Church of the Apostles. Soon, though, that central part of town was colonized by Muslims. The Patriarch wisely, if perhaps not entirely freely, relocated once again to the more safely Christian Phanar district of the City.
The Sultan had Justinian’s church demolished, and on its location was built – with the typical subtlety of the invader – the Fatih Camii, “the Mosque of the Conqueror.” Nothing of the church remains.
Only a single church which stood in Istanbul at the time of the conquest remains in Christian hands; the tiny church of St Mary of the Mongols. Most were turned into mosques, despite the presence of a large local Christian population during the years of the Ottoman Empire. Ironically, tradition holds that St Mary of the Mongols was preserved by the Sultans as a gift to the Christian mother of Sinan, the Muslim convert architect of the Fatih Camii. Many of the historic converted churches of Turkey – not least Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and the Hagia Sophia at Iznik (Nicaea) – were turned into secular museums in the twentieth century, but have since been once again seized to serve as mosques by the Erdoğan government.
5. Fountains Abbey.
It is not only Muslims who have destroyed or appropriated great Christian art and architecture. During the sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformations, European Christians were perfectly capable not only of killing each other, but of destroying sacred buildings and priceless treasures. Sometimes this was explicitly theological iconoclasm, sometimes the rapacious plunder of religious institutions which had lost favor or legitimacy, and sometimes the collateral damage of Europe’s wars of religion.
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries was probably the single most culturally destructive moment in the history of the English speaking world. There were nearly nine hundred English religious houses in his reign; none survived.
We can take the ruins of Fountains Abbey, near Ripon in Yorkshire, as a representative mark of what was lost. Its foundation in 1132 and 1133 AD symbolizes what could be both worthy and sublime in medieval monasticism. It was first founded by thirteen monks expelled from a monastery at York following a monastic riot, but swiftly affiliated itself with the Cistercian Order led by the charismatic and saintly Bernard of Clairvaux.
England’s monasteries were dissolved in waves in the 1530s. There were Catholic precedents for monasteries being closed. A significant number of foreign-run monasteries were shut by English kings during the long Hundred Years War with France. Erasmus, the great Catholic scholar, had been a severe critic of contemporary monasticism. And staunch English Catholics like William Waynefleet, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and St. John Fisher (martyred for his opposition to Henry VIII) had shuttered monastic houses in order to divert their endowments to educational institutions. Henry’s dissolutions were to be different, though.
In the mid 1530s, during Henry’s ever-escalating conflict with the Pope, the King assumed powers to investigate standards of English monastic life, and to shut the smaller monasteries. The smaller monasteries were thought to be inefficient, badly governed, and morally corrupt. There is some suggestion that Henry was not initially set on completely extirpating English monasticism. The Act which allowed the dissolution of the smaller houses made provision for their monks to be “committed to great and honourable monasteries of religion in this realm, where they may be compelled to live religiously.” This more moderate reform quickly shifted. By 1537, some of the larger houses were being bullied into “voluntarily” surrendering themselves to the King. By 1539, the abbots of Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading were judicially murdered for their refusal to comply. The following year, the last monasteries were finally dissolved.
Hundreds of churches – some barely little chapels, some which rivaled the great cathedrals of Europe – had been destroyed. The vast majority of England’s medieval art had been lost; much of what remained would soon be destroyed when the Reformation entered a more evangelical and iconoclastic phase in the reign of Henry’s zealous son Edward. The great monastic libraries were broken up, with a few important collections being saved by clerics and scholars in the following years. A religious way of life which had been familiar across England from the earliest evangelization of the Anglo-Saxons was snuffed out. Its fate was sealed by one of England’s most tyrannical kings, and the brutal marriage of zealotry and avarice.
The ruins of Fountains Abbey are impressive today. A great belltower remains, 160 feet tall. The vast abbey church is still partially standing, though stripped of its roof, all its internal decoration, and the glass which once filled its impressive rows of arched windows. There are also substantial remnants of the abbey’s cloister and monastic outbuildings. There is a near-intact gothic cellarium (larder) on a lower ground floor. Much of the structure above ground, although well preserved in comparison to other monasteries, has been quarried by local landowners. The nearby Fountains Hall, a magnificent Elizabethan country house, is built partly from the abbey’s reused masonry.
6. The Amber Room.
A jewel of eighteenth century European art, the so-called “Amber Room” (Bernsteinzimmer) was a chamber of the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg. As its name suggests, it was distinctively and opulently fashioned of amber panels in a baroque style. Designed to glow in candlelight, the almost impossibly lavish room was further ornamented with gold leaf, mirrors, and sculpted putti (chubby angelic babies). To modern tastes, the Bernsteinzimmer seems garish (a European Mar-A-Lago!), but it was the pinnacle of eighteenth century luxurious sophistication.
Originally installed in the Royal Palace at Berlin, it was given by the King of Prussia to Peter the Great in 1716. There it remained until it was looted by the German Army in the Second World War, a significantly lower point in Russo-Teutonic relations. Taken to Königsberg (which, ironically, would end the war in Russian hands), the room was disassembled and stored below ground as a precaution against Allied and Soviet bombing raids. Bizarrely, it has never been found.
Theories as to its disappearance abound. Straightforwardly, it may have been destroyed either by the British Royal Air Force’s carpet bombing of Königsburg in 1944, or in the similarly violent storming of the city by the Red Army in 1945. Others have claimed the Bernsteinzimmer might have been shipped out by sea, on one of the ships used by the Nazi government to evacuate East Prussia in the dying days of the war. Possible candidates include the Wilhelm Gustloff or the SS Karlsruhe, both of which were sunk by the Soviets in the Baltic.
The wider context of the Bersteinzimmer is illustrative of how so much art and architecture was destroyed in twentieth century Europe, particularly by Communist regimes. Looting and collateral damage were, of course, part of industrialized, total war. In 1968, the ruins of Königsberg Castle were demolished on Leonid Brezhnev’s orders. Likewise, the room’s original location, the Berlin Royal Palace, was demolished for political reasons by the Soviet occupiers and the East German republic in 1950. On its site was eventually built the magnificently ugly Palast der Republik, which housed East Germany’s sham parliament until 1990. In a rare, small victory for the forces of cultural restoration, in 2007 the German Bundestag decided to rebuild most of the old royal palace, which now serves as a cultural center called the Humboldt Forum.
7. The Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Had it not been for the mass murder in New York in September of 2001, the best known Islamic fundamentalist atrocity of that year might have been an act of unforgivable iconoclasm in Afghanistan. In March 2001, the Taliban destroyed two ancient and monumental Buddhist statues in the Bamiyan Valley.
Before the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan, that portion of Central Asia – sitting on the Silk Road between East and West – had been largely Buddhist. The region contained numerous Buddhist monasteries, and a lively artistic tradition which blended Asian and Greek elements (Afghanistan sits on the farthest edges of Alexander the Great’s old Macedonian empire). Caves and grottos in the area also feature Buddhist wall paintings.
The two monumental statues, reliefs carved into a cliff face, were both vast (standing at 180 and 125 feet), and ancient (dating to the sixth or seventh centuries AD). They would originally have been coated with stucco and painted.
Muslim opposition to the statues as idols goes back at least to the Mugal period. Both Babur (1483-1530) and Aurangzeb (1618-1707) are supposed to have ordered or attempted their destruction. In the end, they were eradicated by Mullah Omar’s Taliban in March 2001. In a process lasting several days, the Taliban used anti-aircraft guns, artillery, and dynamite to obliterate the statues.
8. Palmyra.
The real losses of the long Syrian Civil War are, of course, the human beings brutalized and murdered, whether by an authoritarian government or by barbaric jihadis. Yet in Syria, both the corrupt regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Islamists bear responsibility for the callous destruction of mankind’s priceless heritage.
Emblematic of all this is the city of Palmyra, ancient Tadmor, in central Syria. Having a distinct local culture from antiquity, and speaking a dialect of Aramaic, Palmyra was incorporated into the Roman Empire. Ancient Palmyra came to boast magnificent public buildings in the Greco-Roman style: a theater; great temples of the gods Bel and Baalshamin, and of the goddess al-Lat; a senate house; the Baths of Diocletian; and a second century Great Colonnade. Palmyra’s remains exemplified a merging of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures in the Syrian interior.
Palmyra was captured by the forces of the Islamic State in May 2015. Initially the group claimed that while they would destroy statues they considered idolatrous, they would preserve the World Heritage Site. This was a short lived hope. By June 2015, the Islamic State was both using the Roman amphitheater for the public mass execution of Syrian soldiers, and beginning to systematically demolish the ruins of ancient Palmyra.
In August, the Islamic State beheaded the elderly head of antiquities of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. A native of Palmyra, Khaled al-Asaad (no relation to the dictator) had worked for decades to preserve Palmyra and to advance archaeological study of the city. Al-Asaad managed to evacuate some of the Palmyra museum’s artifacts before the city fell, before being captured by the jihadis. They tortured him in an attempt to learn where they could find more artifacts to destroy, or to sell on the black market. It is hard not to see the murdered al-Asaad as a martyr for a cultural inheritance which belonged to his country and the wider world.
Art and Culture: Loss and Restoration
What, then, are we to make of all this? It’s not hard to see that nothing really lasts forever (except, seemingly, that pyramid at Giza). All our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre, et cetera, et cetera. Fine.
What is a bit more striking is how quickly things can fall apart. Caesar’s boat-burning could turn the bibliophilic work of two hundred years into ash overnight. Caliphal Córdoba and its suburban palaces could go from the center of a rich, sophisticated, and expansionist Muslim polity into a fragmented mess of petty principalities in twenty years. Perhaps we in the West today need to be reminded that we’re always closer to the precipice than we think.
Secondly, while things clearly do sometimes just fall apart, these examples involve a lot of deliberate action. We shouldn’t underestimate how vulnerable a sacred building is to having its purpose swiftly and calculatedly changed. Sometimes this is a catastrophe. Only a philistine can fail to mourn Fountains Abbey, or the zealots’ decision to dynamite the temples of Palmyra. Sometimes, though, decisive action can be for the best. Berlin is for the better without the squat council halls of communism, and maybe it wasn’t so bad that the Parthenon was turned from pagan treasury to the worship of the Galilean. With a little more planning, Athene Parthenos might have happily ended up in a Constantinople museum.
Finally, what is lost can sometimes be regained. The Soviets decided to make a replica of the Amber Room in 1979. It took decades to complete – outlasting the Soviet Union itself – and reopened in 2003. The Royal Palace of Berlin has, as mentioned, been rebuilt. It isn’t just a historical pastiche: three facades have been restored to their original state, while a fourth boasts a surprisingly smart (if arrestingly modern) exterior.
Maybe the best example of restoration is in Paris. In 2019, the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris nearly burned to the ground. Europeans were glued to their televisions and cell phones, watching as the central gothic spire collapsed into a firestorm below. For a moment it really looked as if she wouldn’t survive. Thanks to brave firefighters that evening, to the munificence of the French state, and undoubtedly to prayer, the cathedral stands and is being rebuilt. It is set to reopen this year. Some things, sometimes, can be saved.
