In Athena: The Stage Is Yours, the rock-star archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann presents his vision for a radical makeover of one of the most exalted monuments of ancient Greece. We’re talking about the eastern pediment of the Parthenon, depicting the birth of the goddess, fully armed, from the splitting cranium of Zeus. The ensemble of battered fragments from the original site forms a high point, perhaps the high point, amid the loot that the British Museum has displayed since the Georgian era as the Elgin Marbles. But where, O, where are father and daughter? There’s nothing but daylight in the central gap where they surely belong. Whatever Brinkmann’s thesis, audacity is his middle name. Beginning a quarter century ago, his exhibition “The Gods In Color” and its numerous successors hammered home the proposition that the ancients pictured their gods and heroes not in dead-white marble but in living, even electric color. This wasn’t news, technically, but the polychrome reconstructions he displayed argued the case more viscerally than academic prose ever could. Each piece was informed by rigorous C.S.I.-style forensics, but they also displayed a human touch, reflected in the palette of hand-applied mineral pigments identical to those used in antiquity. From perhaps schematic beginnings, Brinkmann and his wife and top collaborator, Ulrike Brinkmann, who is in charge of painting, have moved on to suppler creations based on science that is no less exacting; and their recent monumental bronzes—based on weathered relics in dusty hues of slate or sea-green—might double as postmodern masterworks. But the look of an object has never been Brinkmann’s be-all and end-all. His higher purpose is to reveal meaning. The multimedia exhibition Athena: The Stage Is Yours marks a quantum leap in that direction, speaking to the Athenians’ sense of who they were and what their place was in the world. As to the riddle of whether Greece will ever succeed in repatriating her stolen marbles, only time will tell. —Matthew Gurewitsch