Putting wisdom in storage?

Feel free to compose your own clever remark about the symbolism of an icon of wisdom vanishing from the frontage of the closed Southland Museum and Art Gallery. The famous statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, has stood vigil for three quarters of a century outside the museum, and before that atop the former Athenaeum library in Dee St.

Lately she has been showing the corrosions of age and exposure to the elements so will be put into storage and will await a restoration project.

So for now the goddess is just another ailing pensioner on a waiting list.

We already have lots of those.

And it may be a long wait, two to four years, before the work gets done. In her vacated place we’ll have site huts for staff on what we joyously expect to be the renovation and reopening of the museum itself. So exit wisdom, for the time being.

And perhaps conflict, since Minerva had other responsibilities, one of which was as the goddess of tactical warfare.

Given the bitterly contentious debate about whether the museum really needed to close as an earthquake risk, some might see the statue’s disappearance as suggestive of a period of greater peace, rather than less wisdom.

Should anyone be wondering what Minerva really has to do with a museum in the first place, she’s often associated with the arts as well.

Which is why even a good, solid, mostly Protestant town such as Invercargill was back in the day was comfortable with her appearance atop the Athenaeum. More classic than pagan, see?

And she was famously chaste – having rebuffed the attentions of the war god Mars, which presumably wouldn’t have been easy.

A #MeToo figure of her time, you might say. Invercargill’s public statues haven’t always had an easy time of it.

When the Boer War trooper was being installed atop the memorial at the corner of Dee and Tay Streets, the duffers dropped him and broke him in three. It took expensive and rather skilled repairs to repair him.

Of the statues that we have lost, some are surely missed.

None moreso than the two plaster nudes that presided – she demurely, while he was smiling – at either side of the screen of the former Regent Theatre. And much laddish comment and attention they attracted, down the decades.

So did Minerva, of course.

She may have been able to rebuff Mars but could only endure with stoicism the clambering of those teenagers who would delight in crowning her spear with a beer can.

And in parting we might recall the tale of the great hero Aeneas, escaped from the fallen Troy, bringing a statue of Minerva to the Temple of Vesta in Rome.

The legend being that the city would be safe from harm as long as the statue was preserved.

This may be something our own civic leaders might want to consider when it comes to the heavy task of confirming their willingness to pay for the possibly $50,000 restoration cost.

Given the bitterly contentious debate about whether the museum really needed to close as an earthquake risk, some might see the statue’s disappearance as suggestive of a period of greater peace, rather than less wisdom.