Respect
the Gods
The Acropolis here is not the luminous marble summit of postcards. It is a wounded sacred landscape, built from dark ground, broken bodies and fragments that refuse to disappear.
Respect the Gods begins with the Persian sack of Athens in 480 BCE, when sanctuaries on the Acropolis were burned and many votive sculptures were damaged. In the drawing, those shattered dedications are treated almost as bodies: not archaeological debris, but sacred presences whose damage still demands a response.
The title draws on the moral world of Sophocles’ Antigone, in which duty towards the dead and the laws of the gods confront political authority. The tragedy is not offered as a literal explanation of the Acropolis. It supplies the ethical question that sits behind the image: after desecration, what is owed to what has been violated?
La Boudeuse
At the centre of the work stands one very specific Kore: the Euthydikos Kore, nicknamed in French La Boudeuse — “the Pouting” or “Sullen Kore”.
Dedicated by Euthydikos, son of Thaliarchos, the statue belongs to the threshold between the late Archaic and early Classical worlds. Her expression is striking because the familiar Archaic smile has disappeared. The upper part was found east of the Parthenon in 1882; the lower part was recovered near the Erechtheion a few years later.
Her presence changes the drawing. She is not simply an emblem of “Greek sculpture”. She is an individual dedication with a known dedicant, a damaged body, a fragmented archaeological history and a face that already seems to belong to the severe world that follows the Persian Wars.
A place revisited over and over.
I have spent so much time on the Acropolis that it no longer feels to me like a single monument. What stays with me are the layers: cuttings in the rock, reused blocks, fragments, damaged sculpture, foundations and the traces left by successive attempts to rebuild a sacred place.
That long familiarity matters to this drawing. The Parthenon is present, but it does not dominate. The image is concerned with what lies beneath and around the celebrated monument — the broken material through which the later Acropolis was made.
Perserschutt: a buried catastrophe
The German term Perserschutt — “Persian debris” — is used for destruction material connected with the Persian sack of the Acropolis. Nineteenth-century excavations brought to light remarkable fragments of Archaic sculpture that had entered fills, pits and rebuilding deposits after the destruction of 480 BCE. Their survival transformed modern understanding of the Archaic Acropolis.
Not one single ritual burial
The archaeology is more complicated than the older picture of dozens of sacred statues being gathered together and buried in one immediate, solemn act after the Persians departed. Some deposits can be closely connected with the destruction, while other material was moved and redeposited later during rebuilding.
That complexity makes the archaeology more interesting, not less. The damaged dedications were not simply hidden and forgotten. They were handled, displaced, incorporated into new fills and walls, and absorbed into the changing topography of the sanctuary.
The sacred body
The drawing takes greater poetic licence than an excavation report can. The broken sculptures become injured bodies and the Acropolis becomes a landscape in which damage to an image of a god or a dedication carries an ethical weight. That is where Antigone enters the work: not as evidence for Athenian practice in 480 BCE, but as a language for obligation towards the sacred and the dead.
From catastrophe to the Parthenon
The Parthenon did not emerge directly from a single burial of the Perserschutt. The transformation of the Acropolis was slower and more political. Architectural fragments were reused, damaged dedications remained embedded in the material history of the rock, and new offerings were made. From the mid-fifth century BCE, the Periclean building programme transformed the summit on a monumental scale.
The Parthenon, begun in 447 BCE, belongs to that later act of reconstruction. In the drawing, its brightness is therefore not a simple happy ending. It is a new monument erected in a landscape that still contained the material memory of catastrophe.
480 BCE
Persian forces sack Athens and burn sanctuaries on the Acropolis.
After 480
Damaged sculpture and architectural material enter pits, fills, walls and later rebuilding deposits.
447 BCE
Construction of the Parthenon begins within the later Periclean transformation of the sanctuary.
Exhibition history
- European Jewish Community Centre, Brussels8 December 2023 – 15 January 2024 · original drawing
- Full Circle, Brussels3 February – 25 April 2024 · original drawing
- Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation, Thessaloniki8 October – 10 November 2024 · original drawing
- Musée BIBLE+ORIENT, University of Fribourg25 March – 25 December 2025 · lithograph
Lithograph · 2024
A separate lithographic edition was produced from the original drawing in 2024 by Bruno Robbe. It is treated as a distinct physical work rather than as a substitute for the 2023 original.
The Acropolis after 480 BCE
- Acropolis Museum, “The dedications” — Archaic Korai, Persian destruction and the archaeological afterlife of damaged dedications. Read online.
- Acropolis Museum, “Dedications of the early Classical period (480–450 BC)” — the artistic world after the Persian Wars. Read online.
- Rachel Kousser, “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis,” The Art Bulletin 91.3 (2009), 263–282. DOI.
- Andrew Stewart, “The Persian and Carthaginian Invasions of 480 B.C.E. and the Beginning of the Classical Style,” American Journal of Archaeology 112.3 (2008).
- Acropolis Museum, Euthydikos Kore (Acropolis 686/609) — object and reference photography. Museum reference.