LONDON.- The exhibition Athens and Grecian Antiquities, 1853-1854, is currently on view at the Hellenic Center, until May 17. Visitors to the Hellenic Center in London have the rare chance this month to see a dazzling display of mid-19th-century photographs of the monuments of Athens, standing in full dress before they were heavily tampered with by the excavators, restorers and looters who were to hack away at them in the years to come. The show contains 38 lustrous photographs taken by James Robertson, a Scotsman and former engraver living in Constantinople who clearly recognized the value of pin-sharp photographs of some of the finest Classical monuments in the world. The first image in the show is of the Parthenon, standing mutilated by 17th-century Venetian gunfire but still noble. Missing from Robertson’s picture is the frieze in the tympanum, carted off to London five decades earlier by Lord Elgin. The Hellenic Center, which is Greece’s equivalent to the British Council, has produced a lush catalogue for the exhibition in which intended restraint on the subject of Elgin eventually gives way in the captions to direct accusations of plunder. Robertson was well aware that Greek antiquities were one of Britain’s most ingrained cultural obsessions, and he carefully sent his loot back to London to be published in folio albums. These were collected by aficionados and leafed through in the cool of Victorian drawing rooms by vicarious travelers. Robertson saw his photographs as a corrective to the velvety fantasies of romantic painting. His images were among the first taken of the glories of Athens and he was, he fancied, a technician of the truth. The collection on display in London comes from the Benaki Museum in Athens, but there is another set in the Victoria and Albert Museum and a further one in the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Robertson’s photographs comprise one of the most important documentary records of Athens monuments of the period; and they have also, ironically, now acquired the status of the art objects they were supposed to replace.