The True Story of a Stone
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The stone's story begins millions of years ago at the bottom of an ocean or perhaps a lake, where the skeletons of countless microscopic organisms slowly settled on the ocean floor over the course of thousands of years.
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These skeletal remains were transformed into limestone through gentle compression from the weight of the water above them. Limestone is a material that was once a lot of other things, but over time becomes one thing.
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This new rock was then drawn deep into the earth's core, where heat, pressure, and chemical action transformed the limestone into a beautiful white, soft stone called Pentalic Marble. Pentalic Marble was used to build many of the buildings and sculptures in Classical Greece.
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About 2,300 years ago, a giant block of Pentalic Marble was hewn from a quarry north of Athens and transported to artists who carved it into an 8-foot-tall female figure depicting Demeter, the Greek goddess of harvest, fertility, grain, and motherly love.
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It is said that this statue was made to grace the façade of a Greek temple dedicated to Demeter. If this is true, then at some point she was also taken down. Her head was chopped off, her arms were removed. Or maybe they broke off. Her dismembered form was then buried in a deep hole three miles from the ocean. She lay buried in the hole covered in earth, for an unknown number of years. Above her, a war broke out between Greece and Turkey.
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In July 1827, an American naval officer named Commodore Daniel Patterson, who was on an anti-pirating mission in the Mediterranean Sea, landed his ship, the USS Constitution, nearby. He was approached by four hungry and war-ravaged Greek soldiers who knew where Demeter was buried. They sold her secret to Patterson. On July 19, he sent 25 sailors to retrieve Demeter. They tied her 5-ton form with ropes and dragged her three miles across the sand to the ship.
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As they worked, a hysterical local man ran up to them, reporting that he had just seen a statue in a local church miraculously weep. He begged the sailors to leave Demeter where she lay. The captain dismissed him as "superstitious, childish, and absurd,”.
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One sailor fled in panic and was left behind on the beach as the ship set sail. He was never seen again.
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Demeter spent the next year tightly packed in sawdust, tossed about in the cargo hold of the USS Constitution as it as it heaved its way across the wild Atlantic Ocean.
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On July 4, 1828, Demeter arrived in Boston and made history as the largest ancient sculpture to ever touch U.S. soil before the Civil War.
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Captain Patterson wrote to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) offering them the headless, armless, seasick form of Demeter. PAFA accepted the offer. The fact that the sculpture had been effectively looted from a war zone did not seem to be an issue. The letter that Patterson sent, folded and sealed with red wax, has been carefully preserved in a climate-controlled environment in the museum's archives.
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For 45 years, Demeter stood on display in PAFA's courtyard under the largest hawthorn tree in America, being rained on by its largest leaves each fall. Despite the fact that PAFA's first buildings burned in the great fire of 1845, Demeter, with her crystals formed by the intense heat and pressure of the earth's core, survived.
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The statue of Demeter was so highly regarded that a special plinth was built for her for her permanent public display, over the front entrance of the new Furness and Hewitt building–where you are standing now. She was hoisted up onto this perch and cemented down in 1876.
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For 67 years, the 2,300-year-old Demeter stood on her plinth, weathering 67 winters and absorbing 67 years of industrial and automotive pollution. Under these conditions, Demeter's soft white patina gradually shifted through a thousand shades of gray to black.
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A newspaper article from the time reported that "barely one in 1,000 people looks up at the sculpture." One of the people who did look was a man from the Philadelphia Department of Building Inspection, who raised concerns about her structural integrity. He ordered scaffolding to be built around her so that she could be closely examined.
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Marble experts climbed the scaffold and used a machine to send sound waves through the marble body of the statue. She was found to be cracked and declared to be a danger to passers-by on Broad Street below.
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A local sculptor was asked to give an estimate to remove her from the plinth by cutting her body into parts. His bid of $250, a quarter of the cost to remove her whole, was accepted, and subcontractors were hired to carry out the work.
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On August 20, 1937, she was chipped into fragments by two workmen, Paul Ottey and John Brogan. Her stone parts - a foot, a belt, a drape of her gown over her knee - were passed backwards, one at a time, through the narrow central window in this room. The fragments were carried down the sweeping stairs behind you, past the not-crying, intact statues in the collection, all safely indoors.
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The chiseled lumps that were her remains, were given to the PAFA’s sculpture teachers and their students to practice their carving skills. 2,300 years out of the earth, the marble would have been dry and difficult to work. Chipping easily.
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One artist, Charles Rudy, carved one of her pieces into a duck, and another piece became a female figure. The others are all lost. The duck was accessioned into the permanent collection, assigned the number 1942.9 - the ninth object to be accessioned in the year 1942. It has been on public display for many years, but its label does not acknowledge its origins.
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In 2020, I asked PAFA if I could put one of the last remaining fragments of the statue of Demeter, in her current form of a duck, back onto the plinth designed for her in order to continue the story of this stone. The museum said no. They have learned their lesson.
So, I made a copy using today's technology - a robot scanned it, and a robot and a sculptor carved it from the closest marble available to us, 2,300 years after Demeter was first carved.
The new duck will also be accessioned into the museum collection, but with the stipulation that it must first be displayed outside on Demeter’s plinth for the duration of this exhibition. Only then can it come indoors and perch amongst its better-protected colleagues. Its wounds, pock-holes, patina, and crust from weather, pollution, and its fellow birdlife will also now be carefully preserved by the museum.
At the end of this exhibition this collection of 47 artworks will go back into the vault, and these words will be buried under new red paint.
This new duck is outside now, exposed to the elements. You can see it from inside by looking into the mirror above the clear window in this room. On your way out, you can also see it from Broad Street, if you look up.