Introduction
In the late 1930s the art dealer Lord Duveen
offered the Trustees of the British Museum a purpose-built gallery
to house the 'Elgin Marbles'.(1) In 1937-8, while the sculptures of
the Parthenon were being prepared for installation in this new
gallery, a controversial cleaning of some of the sculptures took
place. A major press scandal ensued, and at its height there
appeared a newspaper cartoon (Fig. 1) with the caption: 'Elgin
Marbles being spoilt by Cleaning - Epstein', and underneath, 'Lor,
Em, That Mister Epstein is right. They must have cleaned this bloke
with a pick.'. (2) There has been an attempt to revive this
scandal. A photograph appeared at the head of a newspaper article
in June 1998, (3) trailing the third edition of William St Clair's
book, Lord Elgin and the Marbles. The caption read: 'The point
where masons stopped cleaning the horse of the sun god Helios - and
the previous glowing honey colour that they partly scrubbed off'.
Neither Mr St Clair's book, nor the newspaper coverage of the
claims it makes, has done service to clarifying what actually
happened to the sculptures in the 1930s. The horse of Helios does
not owe its patchy appearance to the cleaning, but to natural
weathering.
The 1930s newspaper cartoon is funny because
it is deliberately misleading. Nevertheless, it represents a
typical reaction to the 1930s cleaning. Fascinated by the scandal
of it, people have tended to make up their own version of its
consequences. There is, and always has been, much loose talk of
'patina'. Adjectives to describe it like 'warm, rich and glowing'
reflect notions of how the sculptures should be, rather than how
they are or were. The cleaning, we are told, has removed their
glow. Contrast this opinion with that of a journalist writing in
The Daily Graphic when the sculptures went back on show in 1949. He
saw them 'glow with a Mediterranean warmth'.(4) This, it should be
noted, was post cleaning, when others had argued that the
sculptures had lost their 'glow'.
Everyone has their own idea of how they think
the Marbles should look. Writing in 1857, Michael Faraday thought
them far from glowing and lamented their discolouration from brown
stains and black soot, whereas - or so he believed - sculptures in
Greece and Italy, unaffected by Museum pollution, were white. (5)
What I take Faraday to mean by 'brown stains' are the orange-brown
coatings that can still be seen in places on the surface of the
sculptures today. In 1988 I published a paper with my colleague
Andrew Middleton entitled 'Paint on the Parthenon Sculptures', (6)
We argued that these coatings were ancient and artificial, and
likely to be the result of paint treatments applied to the stone in
antiquity and afterwards partially weathered off. They appear where
the ancient finish appears to be intact and, where the surface is
weathered, they are missing. There is a dispute as to the origin of
these coatings. The least that may be said is that whether
artificial or natural these coatings are historic. They happened at
specific moments in time and were then affected by weather or
damage. They did not re-form in the areas that were affected by
this wear.
A critical question has to do with the extent
to which these coatings survived up until the 1930s. From an
examination of the marble surface itself it is possible to see that
they had already largely disappeared even before Elgin's men set
eyes on the sculpture. I estimate that when the sculptures entered
the Museum less than 20% of their overall surface retained its
coating, of which in the 1930s about half was removed. The surface
of the sculptures as you see it today is, without question, largely
the product of weathering before they entered the Museum.
This is not to deny that weathered and some
unweathered surfaces underwent further change as a result of the
cleaning of the 1930s and, indeed, earlier. But natural weathering
is by far the single most important factor determining the surface
and colour of the sculptures as we see them today. It is important
to state this at the outset, so as to get the 1930s cleaning into
perspective. In 1998 it was very surprising to read Mr St Clair's
assertion to the contrary, namely that 'when the Elgin Marbles were
transferred to the British Museum in 1816, their ancient patina was
still largely intact'. (7) Up to the 1930s the sculptures were, he
says, a 'warm brown'. (8) Earlier in his account we read that 'in
Elgin's day [they] were covered with a patina, in some places
smooth, in others scaly, in a rich mixture of white, brown, orange
and occasional black, the result of long exposure to the open air'.
(9) This premise has been the very foundation of his argument and
yet no scientific evidence is given to demonstrate it. Watercolour
drawings and oil paintings are offered instead as literal
representations of how the sculptures once were. We read that in
Archibald Archer's oil painting of the Elgin Room the sculptures
are 'honey-coloured'. (10) In fact, under fuliginous layers of old
varnish, they are a pale cream, which is probably the colour Archer
thought they should be, rather than what they were. (Fig.2) St
Clair argues, however, that the sculptures were that colour
actually. If so, his case for their having been covered in the
brown coating is already destroyed. Lord Leighton's self-portrait
now in the Uffizi is cited as evidence for the original colour of
the Parthenon Frieze (11). But when this picture was painted in
1880, it is much more likely that Lord Leighton had in mind the
casts installed in the walls of his own studio (12).
Why, we must ask ourselves, has it been so
difficult, both in the 1930s, and since, for people to give an
accurate report of the cleaning? It is not as if the sculptures
have been hidden from view. St Clair is mistaken when he writes:
'As the Duveen gallery was being built . . . the Marbles were
mostly not on public view'. (13). Photographs of the day and the
Keeper's reports to the Trustees show that, once they had been
cleaned on a piecemeal basis, the sculptures were returned to the
gallery. There we see the cleaned ones looking white against the
uncleaned sculptures and the darkened casts.(Fig.3) Nor, with the
exception of their removal for safety during and after the Second
World War, have the sculptures been hidden from view since their
cleaning. They have been on show since 1949 and, if the damage is
obvious, why was it so little remarked upon? Many published
references have been made to the 1930s cleaning,(14) but the
primary motive of these accounts has been a lust for scandal and,
latterly, the campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles to
Greece. Scandal mongering and politics have not provided a healthy
climate in which to foster a truthful assessment of what actually
was done to the sculptures.
It is ironic that already in 1939, the last
word in the pre-War press coverage tried to move the discussion
forward. On 9 June an anonymous correspondent to The Manchester
Guardian wrote: 'The ultimate question at the bottom of the Elgin
Marbles controversy is what is meant by the magic word "patina". No
one denies that some of the marbles have been pretty drastically
cleaned, in some cases by methods of which no expert could possibly
approve . . . Folk who like to think they have scented out a
first-rate scandal have not been slow to move and a good deal has
been said about it, including the suggestion that the Marbles have
been "ruined". . . . But what, in fact, has happened?'(15)
Sixty years on, that question has yet to be
answered. St Clair claims 'all the metopes, 80 or 90 per cent of
the frieze, and about half the pedimental sculptures of the
Parthenon were damaged by over cleaning at some time before the
halt was called.'(16) 'The most vivid evidence', he says, 'for the
extent of the damage is in the three pieces which were still being
cleaned when Sir John Forsdyke discovered what was going on in
September 1938, the Helios, the head of Selene's horse and the
Iris.'(17) These are the ones mentioned in the Board of Enquiry's
Report. This internal affair was concocted by Sir John Forsdyke,
the Museum's Director, to create scapegoats for what was ultimately
his responsibility. It is unwise to depend upon it as a source for
what actually was done. The Board's phrase: 'the damage is obvious
and cannot be exaggerated', is often quoted, but it seems anything
but obvious and has been much exaggerated.
We read that most of the smaller sculptures of
the west pediment were 'stripped'. Of the Iris St Clair writes:
'The white left leg, where a patch of residual patina had not yet
been removed when the halt was called, looks as if it had been
smeared in dog dirt.'(18) The hyperbole is embarrassing enough, but
it is even more so, when we learn that he is describing entirely
the wrong statue. He should have been looking, as was pointed out
to him in 1998, not at this figure from the west pediment but
another piece from the east pediment. In spite of St Clair's claims
to the contrary, only east pediment pieces were rubbed and these
were the Helios, the back of his two horses' heads, the drapery of
Iris and the back of the head of the horse of Selene.
So what in fact did happen to these and other
sculptures? A detailed analysis of their surface condition is given
below. In order fully to assess this surface, however, something
must be said of previous interventions that have made it what it
has become.