The Parthenon Sculptures
Facts and figures
1. The British Museum's collection
1.1. The terms most frequently used are Elgin Marbles, Parthenon
marbles, and the British Museum’s preferred term, Parthenon
sculptures, or sculptures of the Parthenon.
1.2. Strictly speaking the Elgin Marbles
should refer to the whole collection of stone objects acquired by
Lord Elgin between 1799 and 1810, purchased for the British Museum
with a grant voted by Parliament in 1816. Beside the Parthenon
sculptures, there are elements from other buildings on the
Acropolis and from elsewhere in Athens – not to mention other
sculpture and inscriptions, acquired from other sites on both sides
of the Aegean Sea. The most curious is a colossal Egyptian scarab
beetle in granite, acquired in Istanbul, and on display in Room 4:
Egyptian sculpture. If the term of reference were the ‘Elgin
collection’ then besides objects in stone we should include those
made of other materials, such as Greek vases, bronzes, jewellery,
plaster casts and drawings.
The collection includes the following marble,
architecture and architectural sculpture from the Acropolis:
|
Parthenon |
247ft of
the original 524ft of frieze
15 of the 92 metopes
17 pedimental figures; various pieces of architecture |
| Erechtheion |
a
Caryatid, a column and other architectural members |
| Propylaia |
Architectural members |
| Temple of Athena Nike |
4 slabs of the frieze and architectural members |
1.3. It should be noted that besides those
acquired from Lord Elgin the British Museum's collection of
sculptures from the Parthenon includes fragments from the Society
of Dilettanti and from the Steinhäuser, Cockerell, Inwood,
Smith-Barry, Colne Park and Chatsworth collections, all of which
have no connection with Elgin.
1.4 All the sculptures from the Parthenon in
the British Museum are on permanent public display.
2. Other collections with sculptures from the Parthenon
Material from the Parthenon was dispersed both before and after
Elgin's activities. The British Museum holds approximately half of
the surviving sculptures. The remainder is divided among the
following locations:
| Athens |
Extensive remains of the metopes
(especially east, north and west), frieze (especially north and
west) and pediments; sculptures that remained on the building are
gradually being removed and these, with others, are now being
installed in the New Acropolis Museum |
| Paris, Musée du Louvre |
One frieze slab; one metope; fragments of
the frieze and metopes; a head from the pediments |
| Copenhagen,National Museum |
Two heads from a metope in the British Museum |
| Würzburg, University |
Head from a metope in the British Museum |
| Palermo, Museo Salinas |
Fragment of frieze |
| Vatican Museums |
Fragments of metopes, frieze and pediments |
| Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum |
Three fragments of frieze |
| Munich, Glyptothek |
Fragments of frieze |
3. The Legal Status of the British Museum's collection
3.1. In 1816 a Select Committee of the House of Commons found
that the collection had been legitimately acquired by Elgin as a
private individual. After a debate in the House of Commons, funds
were agreed and the collection was acquired for the British Museum,
where it is held under the terms of the British Museum Act
1963.
3.2. The Trustees hold the whole of the British Museum
collection under the terms of the British Museum Act 1963. This
legislation prohibits the Trustees from permanently disposing of
objects unless they are duplicates of others already in the
collection or are "unfit to be retained ... and can be disposed of
without detriment to the interests of students." It does, however,
provide for objects to be loaned for public exhibition, having
"regard to the interests of students and other persons visiting the
Museum, to the physical condition and degree of rarity of the
object in question, and to any risks to which it is likely to be
exposed." Any decision in connection with a loan request for any
object in the collection takes all of these aspects into account.
The Trustees may not make 'permanent loans', although renewable
loans are possible. The Museum has a published Loans Policy.
4. The Duveen Gallery
4.1. From the beginning of 1817, the Elgin collection was first
housed in a temporary gallery designed by Robert Smirke. His
permanent 'Elgin Room' was completed on the west side of the Museum
in 1832, and the collection remained there until the Duveen Gallery
was built in the 1930s.
4.2. The Duveen Gallery was designed especially to house the
Parthenon sculptures. It was funded by art connoisseur and dealer
Lord Joseph Duveen and designed by American architect John Russell
Pope. The building was completed in 1938, but the outbreak of war
in 1939 interrupted installation of the sculptures.
4.3.During the Second World War the sculptures were fully
protected. The frieze was removed to an unused section of the
London Underground Railway and the pedimental figures and the
metopes were taken down to the Museum vaults. When the sculptures
were first brought out of storage in winter 1948-49, much of the
Museum, including the Duveen Gallery, had been ruined by bombing.
The Parthenon sculptures were, therefore, returned to the former
Elgin Room (currently Room 17) with a display that was complete by
September 1949. It was not until 1962 that the Duveen Gallery
finally opened with its intended display of the Parthenon
sculptures.
4.4 The Duveen Gallery was designed en suite with two side
rooms. Their purpose was to provide explanatory information about
the temple and its setting and to display fragments of sculpture
and architecture that could not be accommodated in the principal
room. In June 1998, with the generous help of the late Lawrence A.
Fleischman and Barbara Fleischman, the side rooms were opened as
completely refurbished information galleries and now include video
displays using computer graphics to explain the positioning of the
sculpture on the building, a full-scale reconstruction of the upper
part of the north-west corner of the building, audio guides and a
touch tour for visually impaired visitors and models of the temple
and the Acropolis. In 2004 new information panels and objects
charting the later history of the building were included in the
display. A generous gift by William H. and Story John made possible
the publication of a Braille book entitled Second Sight of the
Parthenon Frieze by Susan Bird, Ian Jenkins and Fabio Levi
(London, The British Museum Press 1998). Further refurbishments are
in progress.
5. The cleaning of the Parthenon Sculptures in 1938
5.1. In early 1939 there was considerable press interest in a
revelation that during the process of cleaning the Parthenon
sculptures for display in the newly constructed Duveen Gallery
unauthorised methods were used. Contemporary reports, both official
and unofficial, indicate that in addition to the recommended water
and soap copper chisels and carborundum were used on some of the
sculptures over a period of 15 months. The British Museum held an
internal enquiry and as a result the Keeper, F.N. Pryce, took early
retirement, a young Assistant Keeper, Roger Hinks, resigned, and
all the craftsmen concerned left the Museum's employ.
5.2. There were questions in Parliament, and the Trustees
resolved to publish a full report on the effects of the cleaning,
but the outbreak of the Second World War intervened. After the War,
the sculptures did not emerge from storage until 1949, by which
time most observers were happy to herald them as a symbol of the
regeneration of post-war Britain. In 1950, however, Cesare Brandi,
head of the Institute of Restoration in Rome, published an article
critical of the cleaning. There was, surprisingly perhaps, no
published response to this attempt at reviving the former
controversy until 1984, when the private diaries of Roger Hinks and
the Earl of Crawford (a former Trustee) were published
posthumously. In the same year full reference to the cleaning was
made in the Greek demand for the return of the Parthenon sculptures
through UNESCO. The issue was also discussed by the journalist
Christopher Hitchens in his book The
ElginMarbles - should they be returned to
Greece? (1987).
5.3. In 1996 William St Clair renewed his request to see
restricted papers detailing the 1930s cleaning. Access was granted,
and he made extensive use of them in a chapter of the third edition
of his book, Lord Elgin & the Marbles (1998). St Clair called
for an international enquiry into the cleaning and the Museum's
handling of it.
5.4. The Museum replied by announcing a scholarly
conference in its series of Classical Colloquia and inviting Mr.
St. Clair and a team of Greek experts from the Acropolis to present
papers. The conference took place on 30 November and 1 December
1999 and addressed the visual and documentary evidence for the
cleaning with the aim of determining how and to what extent the
surface of the sculptures may have changed. In so doing, attention
was also drawn to a similar cleaning in Greece in 1953, using steel
chisels and brass wire brushes, of a sculptured frieze of the
Parthenon's sister temple in Athens, the Hephaisteion. The
conference also looked at wider issues concerning the history and
ideas of conservation. For the evidence see I. Jenkins,
Cleaning and Controversy: The Parthenon
Sculptures 1811-1939 (BM Occasional Paper 146; London 2001)
6. Access to the Parthenon Sculptures
6.1. The British Museum aims to make the sculptures from the
Parthenon accessible to and understood by the widest possible
audience. The Museum continues to seek ways to improve its
displays.
6.2. The Museum is committed to maintaining its long-standing
status as a centre for Parthenon studies. It does this by
organising conferences and seminars, by publishing scholarly and
popular books and articles, and in facilitating the studies of
others through access to the sculptures themselves and to the
Museum’s unique collection of books, photographs, manuscripts,
drawings and plaster casts. As part of this commitment, the Museum
maintains close links with the Centre for Acropolis Studies in
Athens. It has advised on and in a number of ways assisted the
current programme of conservation of Acropolis monuments. In 1985
it hosted a temporary exhibition on the conservation programme of
the Acropolis monument. There have been several recent exchanges of
plaster casts and architectural historian of the Parthenon,
Professor Manolis Korres, advised on the new model of the Acropolis
made in Greece for the British Museum in 1998. The Museum holds the
work of its colleagues in the Greek archaeological and restoration
services in very high regard and will continue to promote good
relations with them, not least in the creation of the new Acropolis
Museum.
7. Requests for the removal of the Parthenon Sculptures
7.1. The suggestion that the Parthenon sculptures be removed
from the British Museum and sent to Athens is not new. Such a
possibility was first mooted in Britain by Hugh Hammersley MP in
the House of Commons debate of 7 June 1816. Calls from individual
Greeks for their removal began in 1833. In 1965 the Greek Minister
of Culture went so far as to call for all Greek antiquities to be
located in Greece. After the fall of the military dictatorship in
1974, the Parthenon sculptures began to take on a new role as a
symbol of the revived democracy and from 1982 were championed by
the late Melina Mercouri as Greek Minister of Culture. Ever since,
the removal of the Parthenon sculptures from London has been a
feature of Greek Government policy, national and international.
7.2. At the 1982 UNESCO World Conference in Mexico on cultural
policies at Ms Mercouri's instigation, a vote on a resolution
calling for the return of the Parthenon sculptures and their
reincorporation on the building was passed, although there were
many abstentions, including Italy and France, and many absentees.
In October 1983 a formal bilateral request for the sculptures was
made by the Greek Government to the British Government- the first
ever made. Following discussion with the Director and Trustees of
the British Museum, this request was formally rejected by the
British Government in April 1984. It was followed in September by a
further submission of a claim through UNESCO, which was similarly
rejected in 1985, after consultation with the British Museum.
Successive British governments have held the position that this is
a matter for the Museum's Trustees who are the legal owners of the
Parthenon sculptures.
7.3. In May 1997, following a further direct appeal by the Greek
government, the then Secretary of State in the Department for
Culture Media and Sport, the Rt. Hon. Chris Smith MP, affirmed the
Government's position that the issue was a matter for the Trustees
of the British Museum and that the Government would not seek to
have the sculptures sent to Greece. This is still the policy of the
British Government.
7.4. In October 1999 the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of
the House of Commons announced its intention to conduct an enquiry
into the return of cultural property and the illicit trade.
Following the submission of written evidence and visits to the
British Museum, Greece and Italy the Committee held oral sessions,
at one of which the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr. George Papandreou,
presented the Greek position. The full report was published in
March 2000 and the Select Committee, which had been interested to
learn from the Museum of the previous enquiry of 1816, advocated no
change to the present status of the Parthenon sculptures in the
British Museum.
7.5. This position has been reinforced by subsequent cross-party
statements, by letters to the British Committee for the Restitution
of the Parthenon sculptures and MEPs from the former Minister for
the Arts, the Rt. Hon Alan Howarth, and by the Prime Minister, the
Rt. Hon. Tony Blair, in an interview with the Greek newspaper
To Bima (March 2001).
7.6 In November 2002 Evangelos Venizelos, Greek Minister of
Culture, came with a delegation to meet Sir John Boyd, Chairman of
the Trustees of the British Museum, and Neil MacGregor, the
Director, to present for the first time a proposal that the
Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum should be permanently
removed to Athens to a new museum being built near the Acropolis.
This proposal was elaborated at a UNESCO committee meeting in March
2003, linked with the Athens Olympics of August 2004.
The issue of the British Museum's ownership of the sculptures,
which was long disputed by the Greek Government, was said in 2000
to have been put to one side. However, not only was a private legal
action begun in the UK following a visit of the Greek Minister of
Shipping, but in a letter to the Sunday Times of 17 August
2003 Mr Venizelos confirmed that the Greek Government did not
acknowledge that the Trustees of the British Museum own the
Parthenon sculptures in the Museum's collection.
8. Collaboration
8.1.The British Museum has a long-standing history of
collaboration with Greek colleagues. Indeed, the modern
understanding of the Parthenon and its sculptures is based on just
this. The British Museum regularly attends conferences held in
Athens by the Committee for the Conservation of the Acropolis
Monuments. There was also an exchange of much information on
conservation issues at the time of the international conference on
the 1938 cleaning in 1999. The Museum’s Department of Greek and
Roman Antiquities continues to host regular visits by the staff of
the Acropolis restoration project, while its own staff visits
Athens.
8.2. Such collaboration also includes the British Museum’s
repeated supply of casts to Athens. In 1844-46, a full set of
plaster casts of the sculptures of the Parthenon was presented,
together with cement casts of the Caryatid, architectural pieces
from the Erechtheion and reliefs from the Temple of Athena Nike.
Similar gifts occurred in 1912 and in 1932. Between 1976 and 1978
various moulds and casts were provided to the Committee for the
Conservation of Acropolis Monuments. Further requests have resulted
in a series of gifts of casts by the Trustees of the British
Museum, the latest in 2008, while facilities were provided for a
Greek technician to make moulds from casts in the British Museum of
the west frieze for the production of cement casts to go on the
building.
8.3 The British Museum seeks to collaborate with its Greek
colleagues in the widest possible manner by hosting and organising
lectures in London and by inviting their participation in British
Museum conferences.
9. Further common misconceptions
9.1. The British Museum calls the Parthenon sculptures the
'Elgin Marbles'
In the nineteenth century the term 'Elgin Marbles' was used for the
contents of the Elgin Room, which originally housed the entire
Elgin collection. It has also been used popularly to describe the
Parthenon sculptures. The Museum’s preferred term is the Parthenon
sculptures or, as carved on the wall of the Duveen Gallery, 'The
sculptures of the Parthenon'.
9.2. The collection was "stolen" by Lord Elgin
9.2.1. Lord Elgin took up his post as Ambassador to the Sublime
Porte (Istanbul) in 1799. Mainland Greece was then part of the
Ottoman Empire and had been since the Ottomans invaded and took
Athens in 1456. The Acropolis fell two years later.
9.2.2. Elgin was a man of the European Enlightenment and his
actions must be judged according to the times he lived in. His
intention was to improve the arts of Great Britain by making
available casts and drawings of Greek monuments previously known
only from drawings and engravings. To this end, he assembled a
group of architects, painters, draughtsmen and moulders under the
Italian G.B. Lusieri, which began work in Athens in 1800.
9.2.3. However, the continuing destruction of classical
sculptures in Athens persuaded Elgin to remove for posterity what
sculptures he could. In 1801 he was granted a firman (licence and
letter of instruction) as a diplomatic gesture in gratitude for
Britain's defeat of French forces in Egypt, then a dominion of the
Ottoman Empire.. The firman required the Turkish authorities in
Athens not to hinder Elgin's employees in their drawing, modelling,
erection of scaffolding and also allowed them to ’take away any
pieces of stone with inscriptions or figures’. The Italian version
of this firman is now in the British Museum. The presentation of it
to the local authorities in Athens was accompanied by a designated
official from Constantinople (a mubashir who out-ranked all the
local officers) and he participated in its application. Lord
Elgin's work was carried out openly and with the support of local
officials both Turkish and Greek between 1801 and1804. A final
firman, secured by Sir Robert Adair (Ambassador in Istanbul) in
February 1810 from the same authority as the earlier firman,
instructed the authorities in Athens to allow the embarkation of
all the remaining antiquities collected by Lord Elgin.
9.2.4. The opinion of the 1816 Select Committee of the House of
Commons, after examining a series of witnesses, was that Elgin had
acted with the permission of the Turkish authorities, and as a
private individual (although it was suggested that such permission
might only have been given to an Ambassador).
9.3. Lord Elgin ’bought’ the marbles, using ’bribery, pressure
and corruption.’
The firman was granted in 1801 as a diplomatic gesture. The
money expended by Elgin was largely on the salaries of his team, on
transport and on the recovery of a consignment that sank off
Kythera. Presents were given to the Turkish officials in Athens
according to the custom of the times and their total value did not
exceed £600. Elgin presented his full accounts to the Parliamentary
Select Committee in 1816.
9.4. ’More damage was done to the Parthenon in 1801-2 than in
the previous
2,200 years’ (Melina Mercouri, The Times, 15.1.83)
9.4.1. This is untrue. The worst damage to the building itself,
and to the sculptures that were still attached to it, occurred in
1687 when a Turkish powder-magazine in the temple exploded after a
direct hit by the besieging Venetians. Previously the Parthenon was
almost complete as a structure; afterwards it was a ruin.
9.4.2. Earlier significant damage to the structure resulted from
the conversion of the temple into a Christian church about AD 500,
including the construction of an apse at the east end. At this time
the sculptures of the Parthenon suffered the worst calamity in
their history. The whole of the middle section of the east pediment
was removed, entailing the destruction of a dozen statues in all;
part of the east frieze was taken down; and almost all of the
metopes on the east, north and west sides of the Temple were
deliberately defaced. Compared to this, only minimal damage was
inflicted on the building by Elgin's agents in removing some of the
remaining sculptures from further risk, and none of this was to the
sculptures themselves.
9.4.3. The sculptures left by Elgin have greatly deteriorated
since the early nineteenth century. Their ongoing deterioration was
noticed as early as the 1870s, when a new set of casts was taken of
the west frieze and was compared with that made in 1802 for Lord
Elgin. Further concern at the ongoing damage was expressed when in
the 1920s Walter Hege’s photographs of the west frieze were
published. In the 1960s a new situation arose from the sudden and
immense growth of the population of Athens which, along with
industrialisation, brought about urban atmospheric pollution on a
scale that corroded not only the exposed sculptures, but also the
surface of the Parthenon itself. As Greek scholar Olga Palagia
wrote in The Pediments of the Parthenon (Brill Leiden,
1993) after the sculptures that remained in the west pediment were
lifted down in 1977, ’the industrial pollution of modern Athens had
wreaked havoc upon their delicate surface’. Similar observations
were made in a report by a Greek team of archaeologists and
conservators following the eventual removal of the 14 blocks of the
west frieze in 1993. Meanwhile, some sculptures (including the
metope at the extreme west of the south side, which was once the
very finest and best preserved of all) are still on the
building.
9.4.4. The stability of the Parthenon itself and the condition
of all its parts were greatly endangered by the restoration work
carried out by Nikolaos Balanos in the 1920s and 1930s. His method
of stapling fragments together using iron bars that subsequently
corroded and expanded, causing the marble to split and shatter, was
especially damaging. This use of iron bars, unprotected by lead
casings, ran counter not only to contemporary conservation practice
but even to ancient Greek methods of construction. Balanos' work
has in recent years been firmly condemned by Greek experts. For
example, in 1994 Professor Charalambos Bouras of the Committee for
the Conservation of the Acropolis Monuments described the work of
Balanos, in Tournikiotis (ed.) The Parthenon and its Impact on
Modern Times as ’truly catastrophic for the monuments" and a
"terrible disaster’.
9.5. ‘Part of the collection was lost at
sea’
There was a consignment of 17 crates on
Elgin's ship Mentor when it sank off the island of
Kythera. Every single crate, however, was salvaged at Elgin's
expense and nothing was lost.
9.6. Lord Elgin sold the sculptures to the
British Government for profit
Although from 1803 it had been Elgin's
declared intention to present the sculptures to the nation, on his
return to England in 1806, following imprisonment by the French, he
was afflicted with severe financial problems. In 1810 he began
informal negotiations with the Government for the sale of his
collection. In 1815 the collection was eventually offered for
£73,600 (representing his costs and 12 years' interest, but not the
value of the sculptures) with the proposal that, if this were
refused, Elgin would abide by the value to be determined by a
special Committee of the House of Commons. The Committee held that
the value of the collection was £35,000 - a valuation which Elgin
had no option but to accept - and because of his financial problems
the sale went through. The British Museum acquired the sculptures
from Lord Elgin with a grant of funds agreed by Parliament.
9.7. "The marbles would look much better on
the building for which they were intended"
9.7.1. It is now universally agreed that the
remaining sculptures cannot be repositioned on the Parthenon
itself. In spite of the current programme of careful conservation,
the building will remain an unprotected ruin liable to damage both
from earthquake and from environmental conditions.
9.7.2. The committee for Conservation of the
Acropolis Monuments has long recognised that the sculptures on the
Parthenon need protection from the elements and in particular from
the polluted air of modern Athens. In 1983 the Committee announced
its plans gradually to remove all sculpture from the building and
to substitute casts.
9.7.3. In May 1989 Melina Mercouri announced
an international competition for the siting and planning of a new
museum to house the material from the Acropolis (similar
competitions had been held in 1976 and 1979). In 1990 the first
prize was awarded to the Italian architects Lucio Passarelli and
Manfredi Nicoletti and a completion date of 1996 was announced.
Argument between the political parties, however, overturned the
result. Problems were also encountered in purchasing the required
land. When archaeological excavation of the site eventually began,
it revealed extremely important new information on the city of
Athens in late antiquity.
9.7.4. In November 1999, the Greek Government
announced a new architectural competition, with the intention of
preserving the archaeological remains below the new museum. In late
September 2001 the winner was announced (Tschumi and Photiades).
Construction work began in 2002, amidst claims of destroying
unpublished archaeological remains. In autumn 2003 the Greek
Supreme Court ruled that the building was illegal. The Greek
Government, nevertheless, maintained that the new museum would be
built and open to the public in time for the Olympic Games in
August 2004. That did not happen, but the museum has now been built
and is expected to open gradually until full opening is achieved in
2009.
9.8. "Open an outpost in Athens - the
sculptures can remain the property of the British Museum"
9.8.1. The idea that the British Museum could
open an annex for the Parthenon Sculptures in Athens was first
proposed to the Museum in November 2002 by the Greek Culture
Minister, Mr Evangelos Venizelos (7.6 above), although the idea had
been released to the press as early as July 1999. In the House of
Commons on 29 October 2003 Estelle Morris, Minister for the Arts,
confirmed on legal advice that it would not be possible for the
British Museum to locate repositories for artefacts outside the UK
without primary legislation and that the Government had no plans to
introduce such legislation. Mr Venizelos confirmed in a letter to
the Sunday Times on 17 August 2004 that the Greek
Government does not recognise that the Parthenon sculptures in the
British Museum are the property of the Trustees.
9.9. ‘We only ask for the Parthenon sculptures
- they are a special case because they were made as integral pieces
for a building that still survives and are not movable works of art
that can be displayed anywhere’
9.9.1 In the past the Greek Government has
sought the return of artefacts other than the Parthenon sculptures.
In 1965, for example, the Greek Minister of Culture demanded the
return of all Greek antiquities. There have also been calls from
individual Greek politicians for the return of the Bassai
sculptures in the British Museum, the Nike of Samothrace and the
Venus de Milo, both in the Louvre, and the Aigina sculptures in
Munich. The Greek Government insists that the Parthenon sculptures
are the only objects that it now seeks to claim, although local
politicians sometimes make other demands.
9.9.2 The claim that the sculptures are a
unique case because they were made for a specific building which
still survives ignores many other examples of composite works of
art made up of different pieces and created for specific locations
which are now divided between museums and galleries all over
Europeand the United States of America. These include not only
other antiquities, but also the many medieval or renaissance
altarpieces made for churches which, unlike the Parthenon, are used
for their original purpose.
9.10. ‘The best solution is to have all the
sculptures back together as a coherent whole’
9.10.1. The New Acropolis Museum is designed
to bring together the remaining sculptures from the Parthenon
within sight of the building on the Acropolis. However, only about
50% of the original sculptural decoration of the Parthenon survives
from antiquity. It is, therefore, impossible to recreate the
building's ornamentation as a whole, which has been irretrievably
damaged since the seventeenth century.
9.10.2. The aim of representing all known
sculptures of the Parthenon in one place can be achieved without
their physical reunion. The British Museum has furnished Greek
colleagues with a full set of casts of all the Parthenon sculptures
in the British Museum, while 3D scanning offers opportunities to
reunify the sculptures virtually.
9.10.3 Removal of the Parthenon sculptures to
Athens would serve to highlight above all their local and national
meanings. While the sculptures are understandably of great
importance to the national heritage and culture of Greece, their
display in the British Museum alongside works of other great
civilisations, ancient and modern, has made them part of a European
and world story of human cultural achievement. By sharing
sculptures roughly equally between the British Museum and the New
Acropolis Museum, different understandings of the same objects can
co-exist and complement one another, thus enriching our experience
of what the Parthenon and the ancient civilisation that created it
may represent.
9.11. ’The marble sculptures of the Parthenon
need to be seen in the bright light of Athens, not in gloomy
London’
9.11.1. Transfer of the Parthenon sculptures to Athens will not
restore them to the Parthenon in open air, but will remove them
from one museum environment to another, both of which museums will
rely upon a combination of natural and artificial light.
10. A summary of the general debate
10.1. Arguments used to support the removal of the Parthenon
sculptures from the British Museum to Athens are usually based on
two main themes. The first seeks to discredit Lord Elgin and his
actions, while the second promotes the Parthenon sculptures as a
symbol of Greek identity.
10.2. In reply to the attacks on Lord Elgin, it cannot be
stressed too much that without his intervention the sculptures of
the Parthenon would be in a very sorry state and that the modern
removal of the west pediment figures and the west frieze
demonstrate this absolutely. Lord Elgin can only be judged by the
standards of his own day. Those who attempt to bring Lord Byron's
comments to bear should be reminded that he believed that the
Parthenon should slowly melt into the landscape; he had no concept
of preservation and himself brought Greek sculpture back to Britain
for sale. Elgin’s actions withstood the close scrutiny of a
Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816.
10.3. The second position that seeks to promote the sculptures
as a symbol of the modern Greek state is much more emotive. Some
have attempted to counter this with arguments about the purely
Athenian rather than Greek nature of the monument, while others
have sought to query the racial mix of modern Greeks. For its part,
the British Museum acknowledges the right of the modern state of
Greece to claim its most spectacular ancient building as a symbol
of national identity. However, the sculptures, and by extension the
building itself, have over the last 200 years acquired a European
and worldwide significance. This is now an essential element in
their appreciation which is best ensured by the continued sharing
of the Parthenon sculptures between museums in several different
European countries.
10.4. It should be stressed that the acquisition by the British
Museum of the Parthenon sculptures in 1816 helped to promote the
surge of philhellenism in Britain that led to the involvement of
European powers in the freeing of Greece and the ultimate creation
in 1833 of the modern Greek state. The sculptures from the
Parthenon now in the British Museum have been in London longer than
the modern state of Greece has been in existence. As a result, they
have become part of this country's heritage and have acted as a
central focus for western European culture, and its admiration of
ancient Greek culture. They have found their home in a museum that
was born out of the free spirit of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment with an international culture transcending national
boundaries.
10.5. In conclusion, it may be said that the claim for
restitution revolves not around the question of the 'Elgin Marbles'
but around the much larger issue of whether collections like that
of the British Museum are seen to have a valid role to play in
world culture. It calls into question the whole notion of a world
collection in which visitors can learn about the cultures of the
world, ancient and modern.
11. Select bibliography
On Elgin and the sculptures as cultural property:
Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the
Earl of Elgin's Collection of Sculpted Marbles (1816)
A.H. Smith, "Lord Elgin and his Collection", Journal of
Hellenic Studies 36 (1916) 163-372
William St. Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles (Oxford,
1967; 1983; 1998)
D. Williams ‘Of publick utility and publick property': Lord
Elgin and the Parthenon Sculptures", in A. Tsingarida and D. Kurtz
(eds.), Appropriating Antiquity: Saisir l'Antique (2002)
103-164.
On the history and reception of the Parthenon and its
sculptures
M. Beard, The Parthenon (Profile 2002)
I. Jenkins with Andrew Middleton, ‘Paint on the Parthenon
sculptures’, The Annual of the British School at
Athens 83 (1988) 183-207
I. Jenkins, ‘Acquisition and supply of casts of the Parthenon
sculptures by the British Museum 1835-1939’ The Annual of the
British School at Athens 85 (1990) 89-114
I. Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the
sculpture galleries of the BritishMuseum (BM
Press, 1992)
I. Jenkins, ‘John Henning’s Frieze for the Athenaeum’, in
H.Tait and R. Walker (eds.) The Athenaeum Collection (The
Athenaeum 2000) 149-156.
J. Rothenberg, ‘Descensus ad Terram’: The Acquisition and
Reception of the
ElginMarbles
(1977)
P. Tournikiotis (ed.), The Parthenon and its Impact in Modern
Times (1994)
On the sculpture:
B. Cook, The ElginMarbles (1984)
I. Jenkins, The Parthenon Frieze (BM Press 1994)
I. Jenkins with I. Kerslake and D. Hubbard, The Parthenon
Sculptures in the BritishMuseum (BM Press
2007)
J. Neils, The Parthenon Frieze (Cambridge 2001)
O. Palagia, The Pediments of the Parthenon (Brill
1993)
A. Mantis, ‘Parthenon central south metopes: new evidence’, in
D. Buitron-Oliver (ed.) The Interpretation of Architectural
Sculpture in Greeceand Rome.
Studies in the History of Art 49 (Washington DC 1997) 67-81.
Gives references to further articles by the same author.
K. Schwab, ‘Celebration of victory: the metopes of the
Parthenon’, in J. Neils (ed.) The Parthenon from Antiquity to
the Present (Cambridge 2005) 159-197
J. Neils (ed.) The Parthenon from Antiquity to the
Present (Cambridge 2005)
The British Museum
2008