Will
Britain lose its Marbles?
If the British Museum returned Lord Elgin's treasures to Greece, how safe would
any loot be?
http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/2000/02/05/marbles/index.html
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By Elkan
Allan
Feb. 5, 2000 |
The story begins with a deal that Elgin
struck in 1801. The Scottish Earl of Elgin, a passionate amateur collector of
antiquities, had proposed himself for the post of British ambassador to
Turkey's Ottoman Empire because of his health. He had syphilis, a disease which
was to leave him as distressingly noseless as many of the chipped statues he
collected, and the doctors recommended a warm climate.
Europe was in the grip of the Romantic
revival, and he was obsessively keen to record and, if possible, obtain as many
of the ancient Greek treasures now in the uncaring care of Turkey. His purpose,
he wrote, was to improve the modern art of Great Britain by permitting its
artists to see firsthand the greatest examples of sculpture ever made.
Ruling a wide swath of the ancient world,
the potentates of Constantinople were pleased to accept bribes, gifts, money
and munitions from the warring countries of England and France. In return, they
gave permission to record, then sketch, then dismantle, and finally, transport
the monuments and sculptures by earlier inhabitants of the empire they now
ruled. They regarded the newfound passion of the European aristocracy and
artists for ancient Greek artifacts as faintly ludicrous. But if the English
and the French wanted to compete in carting those long-neglected relics halfway
round the world, let them.
So it was that Elgin (called
"Eggy" by his vivacious young bride) was able to wheedle and buy
permission to collect any chunks of the Parthenon crowning Athens' Acropolis
that had crashed to the ground, and, he airily assumed, any more that might
possibly fall down in the future.
Built between 447 and 432 B.C., the
Parthenon was a vast building masterminded by the Athenian statesman Pericles.
Over the years, the Acropolis had many times been a battleground. In 1687 a
Turkish powder magazine in the temple exploded after a direct hit by besieging
Venetians, destroying a large part of it. The rubble was used as building
material and rifled by souvenir hunters. All that was left intact of the
three-dimensional art that had filled the building was part of the frieze and
metopes (sculpted pictures) and some pediment sculptures.
Elgin set about dismantling 274 feet of the
original 524-foot frieze, 15 of the metopes and 17 figures from the pediments.
They ultimately filled over 100 large packing cases. That some of the best
examples of Phidias' art broke into fragments while being lowered to the ground
was unfortunate, but that did not stop Elgin from squirreling up the bits.
The treasures' subsequent adventures
included sinking in shipwrecks, heavy-handed salvaging, being possessed by and
rescued from Napoleon's fleet, and then lying, dispersed and neglected -- for
many years awaiting transportation to London.
Elgin himself suffered imprisonment in
France, the infidelity and divorce of his countess, worsening health and
near-bankruptcy caused by the enormous cost of dismantling, transporting and storing
120 tons of marbles, which were finally piled up in the back garden of a house
at the corner of Piccadilly and Park Lane.
Most distressing for Elgin was finding that
his reputation had become that of a despoiler of an ancient civilization. His
detractors were led by the mad, bad Lord Byron, whose hand probably carved on
the Acropolis the lines, "Quod Non Fecerunt Gothi, Fecerunt Scoti" --
"What the Goths spared, the Scots have destroyed." In the bestselling
narrative poem, "Childe Harold," Byron wrote:
The last, the
worst, dull spoiler, who was he?
Blush, Caledonia! such thy son could be!
... Cold as the crags upon his native coast,
His mind as barren and his heart as hard,
Is he whose head conceiv'd, whose hand prepar'd
Aught to displace Athena's poor remains ...
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defac'd, thy mouldering shrines removed,
By British hands ..."
But
Napoleon met his Waterloo, and the loot that he had collected for the Louvre
was sent back: The four horses from St. Mark's to Venice, Rubens' "Descent
from the Cross" to Antwerp, the Medici Venus to Florence. And so, at last,
victorious England was able to consider buying the Parthenon Marbles from Lord
Elgin.
Elgin
claimed that he personally had spent 62,440 pounds on bribes, workmen,
transportation and storage -- roughly $10 million at today's prices -- but the
best offer a government committee could come up with was 35,000 pounds.
Reluctantly, he took it, and returned to Scotland to father eight children with
a new countess, adding to the four already born to the first Lady Elgin.
The British government handed the marbles
over to the British Museum for safekeeping and preservation, but they soon fell
victim to the misguided Romantic notion that all Greek art should be pristine
white. In fact, the Parthenon Marbles were probably brightly painted when new
and were certainly dark brown when removed by Elgin (although how much of that
was grime and pollution is debatable). Nor did the Victorians like their
sculptures incomplete: If noses, arms and genitalia had been chipped off, new
ones were often stuck on.
Over the next century, the golden patina of
the Elgin Marbles was scrubbed whiter and whiter until the final desecration,
by order of Sir Joseph (later Baron) Duveen. The picture dealer had made
millions of dollars selling often dubious and touched-up old masters to the new
rich of the United States, and was now busily buying honors for himself. In
1928 he offered to build a new gallery for the British Museum to house the
Elgin Marbles -- on condition that they were made more attractive to the public
(and reflected more glory on himself).
On his orders, paid masons attacked the
marbles with metal tools and Carborundum, leaving them whiter than white but --
according to the modern Greeks -- irreparably harmed. Dr. R.D. Barnett, then
the museum's keeper of Western Asiatic antiquities, wrote a suppressed memo
detailing his shock at seeing a laborer "day after day using hammer and
chisel and wire brushes."
So damaged were the Elgin Marbles that they
were placed behind barriers -- still there today -- so that the public could
not get close enough to see the ravages. And serious scholars have always
resented the way Duveen arranged them around the sides of his gallery, when they
were meant to be seen as a continuous narrative as they were approached and
circled.
In Elgin's day, the marbles were
exhaustively studied by working artists, who had the benefit of naked models in
poses echoing those of the statues. Today they are high on tourist lists and
are, indeed, the very best value in London, as entry to the museum is free.
To get to the Duveen Gallery, turn left at
the entrance and go through the stunning Egyptian collection. You won't see
"Elgin" or "Marbles" written anywhere -- the collection is
neutrally described as "Sculptures of the Parthenon."
Once inside, there is no sense of
anticlimax. These really are what critics have praised for 200 years as simply
the most magnificent sculptures in the world. Despite their incompleteness,
despite their unnatural color, despite the poor arrangement, the sculptures
come alive at a glance. You swear you can see the rippling of muscles and the
sway of materials. Grace and beauty are meaningful terms here. The centerpiece
of a family sacrifice is restrained and moving. The long parade of horses and
riders is magnificent.
Oddly, for a noncommercial institution, the
British Museum allows champagne and gourmet food parties in the gallery in
return for high rental fees. The marbles have become a prized setting for
corporate hospitality parties. These parties have got the Museum into more hot
water, as guests are even permitted to be photographed in Ancient Greek fancy
dress with the Elgin Marbles as a decorative background.
Sir Kenneth Alexander, a former trustee of
the National Museum of Scotland, describes this as a "crass misuse of one
of the world's greatest antiquities." Andrew Dismore, a Greek-speaking
member of Parliament, says: "I am frankly dismayed at the attitude of the
museum. What are we going to have next? Themed orgies in the Roman
galleries?"
A museum publicist shrugs: "I am amazed
that there should be any reaction to the museum holding dinners and receptions
there. Everybody does it now."
At a symposium arranged by the museum to placate
Greek activists in December, an official confessed for the first time that,
"The way Duveen went about cleaning the sculptures was a scandal, and the
way the museum tried and failed to cover it up was a scandal."
"The British Museum is not infallible;
it is not the pope," admitted Dr. Ian Jenkins, deputy keeper of Greek and
Roman antiquities. "Its history has been a series of good intentions
marred by the occasional cock-up: The cleaning was such a cock-up."
But almost identical techniques, he said,
including wire brushing and scraping with metal chisels, had been used in
Athens in the 1950s on the Hephaesteum Temple. "And while people moralize
about bribes paid by Lord Elgin 200 years ago, and protest about cleaning that
happened 60 years ago, South Metope 1 and North Metope 32, two of the finest
sculptures that ever there were, still rot on the Parthenon as I speak."
Ah, but if you let us have them back, we
would conserve all the marbles in a new 30-billion drachma ($109 million)
Acropolis Museum, retorts the Greek government. And it would be very nice if
they -- along with the other bits in Paris, Copenhagen, Palermo, the Vatican,
Heidelberg, Munich, Würzburg, Strasbourg and Vienna -- were returned by 2004,
when Athens hosts the Olympic Games.
President Clinton wants Britain to hand them
back, according to Elisavet Papazoe, the Greek government minister who showed
the U.S. president and daughter Chelsea around the Parthenon last year
Papazoe said Clinton promised to bring up
the issue with Prime Minister Tony Blair. But Blair is known to be antagonistic
to the demand, unlike former leaders of his Labor Party, Neil Kinnock and
Michael Foot, who had both pledged a future Labor government to return the
sculptures. The best Blair can come up with is a select committee to look into
the matter -- a familiar Parliamentary palliative.
If he did return them and that set a
precedent, how many of the world's museum collections would then have to be
also returned?
Mark O'Neill, director of Glasgow Museums,
who has returned the Ghost Dance Shirt originally taken from the corpse of a
Sioux warrior at the Battle of Wounded Knee, believes it could be as much as 10
percent for museums with major ethnographic collections: "It's all about
values and ethics. A shirt that was ripped off the body of a dead Sioux had no
business in our collection."
The looting of treasures has been going on
at least since Biblical times. It is recorded in Chapter 52 of the Book of
Jeremiah that "the Chaldaeans broke up the bronze pillars from the Temple
of the Lord, the wheeled stands and the bronze sea that were in the Temple of
Yahweh, and took all the bronze away to Babylon."
More recently, in World War II, Germany
plundered 427 museums in the Soviet Union, taking the pick of them to Berlin.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington coveted 202 paintings salvaged from
the wreckage of Germany and "liberated" some of them. The decision
was supported by Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum, who
opined, "The American people have earned the right in this war to such
compensation if they choose to take it."
American archive officers on the spot
demurred. In the Wiesbaden Manifesto, they stated that "the transportation
of these works to America establishes a precedent which is neither morally
tenable nor trustworthy." President Truman agreed, and all the art taken
to the United States for "safeguarding" was subsequently returned.
In another case of disputed museum holdings,
the Trojan treasures now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow once belonged to the
Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin. They were thought to have been
destroyed until it was disclosed in 1991 that they had been taken to the
Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Germany wants them back, but its claim is disputed by
Turkey, which asserts that German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated
and smuggled them illegally from Turkey in the 19th century. When they were put
on show at the Pushkin in April 1996, the Turkish ambassador to Moscow refused
to attend the opening.
Similarly, various competing historical
claims put the British Museum collection particularly at risk. Among them:
Some
Zuni Indian claims are equally contentious. In 1990, the U.S. Congress required
museums to respond to requests from Native Americans for the return of "sacred
objects and communally owned cultural patrimony." As a result, private
collectors and art dealers, as well as museums, have sent many wooden gods back
to New Mexico.
But
the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, refused to return a wooden god in its
collection. They replied that it was not a real one -- Frank Hamilton Cushing,
an anthropologist, made it. The Zunis retorted that the god was certainly
authentic because Cushing made it with "Zuni knowledge."
The
piece is still in Oxford, but for how long is anybody's guess. In the new world
of international political correctness, pressures are building for a global
treasure hunt.
One
expert who appreciates the new mood is Ricardo Elia, professor of archaeology
at Boston University and the editor of the Journal of Field Archaeology.
"The only way to collect ethically, and without contributing to the
looting problem," he says, "is to refrain from acquiring anything
unless it can be proved to have been legally removed and exported from the
country of origin."
Curators
and collectors, look to your mantelpieces, empty your glass cases and prepare
for the great swap of the 21st century. Maybe you'll get something from your
country back in return.
salon.com | Feb. 5, 2000
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