The Elgin Marbles: Another View, by Michael Miller

[Michael Miller]

Every stay in London should begin and end with a visit to the Parthenon Sculptures, or Elgin Marbles, if you like. Years ago my father and I cherished this ritual[1] on our annual visits. Last fall, my son and I unconsciously fell into the same pattern. After my father’s death, I spent periods in London pursuing post-doctoral research in the Prints and Drawings Study Room at the British Museum, and I found myself dropping into the Duveen Gallery every morning on my way in and every afternoon on my way out, spending a few minutes to set my aesthetic compass by a metope or a fragment of the pediment or frieze. As ritualistic as this may seem, it was not willed. It was simply what I wanted to do before and after a day with the great European draftsmen. Now my father and I agreed that the Severe Style masterpieces, the pediments from Olympia and Aegina, were closer to our hearts, no matter how much we recognized elegance of the Parthenon Sculptures. (This whole discussion is, like Huntley’s, highly personal, as our relationship to art should be.)

And, of course, regular visits to London are more a part of our lives than visits to Olympia or even Munich. At Olympia we see the pediments in a site museum dedicated to finds taken from Olympia and Olympia alone. In Munich, we see the sculptures from Aegina as the crown of one of the world’s great collections of Graeco-Roman antiquities, begun by King Ludwig I in 1806, five years after Lord Elgin took possession of the Parthenon Sculptures. (Ludwig acquired the Aegina sculptures in 1816, the same year the British nation acquired the Parthenon Sculptures after painstaking due diligence in examining Elgin’s right of ownership as well as their quality.) From the Glyptothek, we can cross the Königsplatz to the Antikensammlung and immerse ourselves in its matchless collection of Greek vases. Barely two hundred yards away is the Lenbachhaus with its Blaue Reiter collection. The Alte and Neue Pinakothek are also minutes away by foot. But at the British Museum, we can find an astonishing variety of objects from all over the world. Only western painting is absent to any significant degree. There visitor can consider the Parthenon Sculptures in the context of European drawings, Indian sculpture, Celtic ornament, or Chinese painting, as he or she chooses. Nothing can be more conducive to the sort of cosmopolitan view of the world we so desperately need to cultivate in our world, in which global, national, and sectarian forces are dangerously working in opposition.

The British Museum, as the world’s quintessential encyclopedic museum, contains the world in macrocosm. There are some who fashionably detest such an institution as an obsolete symptom of imperialism, but, apart from the culture in which part of its growth took place, this politically correct notion is not relevant at all. The British Museum was founded on the collection of Sir Hans Soane (1660-1753), whose activities and interests belong securely in the tradition of the great Renaissance collectors, which includes, typically, the Medici, King Charles I, and William Cavendish, the Second Duke of Devonshire, who formed the nucleus of the collections at Chatsworth, to name only a few. In Britain their activity emerged from their experience of the Grand Tour as young men. When, for example the British Museum’s collection of drawings underwent its most active period of growth at the height of the British Empire, this was no more than a continuation of a tradition begun in the Renaissance and informed by the scientific methods of the late nineteenth century. However, no cultural phenomenon can be understood in isolation from its broadest cultural context, and the Empire is more obviously visible, one must admit, in the formation of the Asian Collection—which itself began with Sloane.[2]

But the whole discourse of post-imperialist critique (not to mention the restitution of artwork) is fraught with emotions, muddled issues, and self-interest. There is no room here to pentrate its mists. It is best to read about the matter in depth, beginning with the British Museum site itself, which includes links to opposing statements by the Greek government: 1. statements 2. background, with facts and figures and a discussion of the controversial 1938 cleaning. Then one can move one to Mary Beard’s popular little book, The Parthenon, which is soundly non-committal, although its brevity makes it a bit thin on details and her forced chattiness and chummy cynicism bring loaded slang words to bear—unfairly—on some of the more innocent actors in the drama, for example King Otto and his architect Klenze. (We may chastise the dead for obvious vices like greed and violence, but not for participation in the mentality of their own times, however risible it might seem from our own perspective.) The work of legal scholar John Henry Merryman, recent books like James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? and the due diligence of the British Museum itself (spurred on to virtue by the 1999 symposium and the bad press surrounding it) provide little tangible support for the return of Lord Elgin’s Marbles, from the point of ownership, preservation, educational values, availability, and so forth. (I plan to discuss these issues further in my forthcoming review of Dr. Cuno’s book.)

Just as the Parthenon itself is conceived both as an architectural masterpiece and a ruin, its sculptures, whether they are in the Louvre, the Duveen Gallery, or the Acropolis Museum, are thought of as art and as remnants of a much-troubled archaeological site. In the time of Lord Byron, one of the early objectors to the importation of the sculptures to Britain, it was de rigueur to feel such art through the haze of passing time and its work, as Keats did most intensely in his sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time.”

My spirit is too weak; mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.

The wasting grind of scientific progress has deprived us of this cathartic sentiment by objectifying our vision of ancient monuments, whether we occupy ourselves with them in some concerted way or whether we are among the hordes disgorged from tourist buses. Still, we are open to the urge to restore these romantic feelings in some way. Some people resort to speculations, attributing the grander works of the ancients, for example the pyramids, to visiting space aliens, merging the old poetic melancholy with a newer strains of fantasy: science fiction and the New Age. Others are prone to reach for the present anxieties of our time, concern about the environment or about the present-day looting of archaeological finds—an undeniably objective ground for criminal prosecution and restitution—concerns that come all too readily to mind as we stand before the Parthenon itself and look out over the Athens smog, or read about the scandals at the Getty Museum. Have you never hiked to some amazingly beautiful natural prospect—a waterfall or a mountain top—and not felt resentment at the inevitable cast-off beer cans and plastic bags? If Huntley’s sensual enjoyment of the sculptures is roiled by concerns over their provenance, he is showing himself as a true romantic, an heir to Lord Byron through his more discordant twentieth century reincarnation, Melina Mercouri.[3]

On the one hand, Lord Elgin’s marbles have been in England for over two hundred years, and they are, through this presence and through the vitality and age of the classical tradition in Britain, as British—or rather cosmopolitan—as they are Greek. The classical tradition and the values it communicates are potent only insofar as they are the heritage and common currency of the world at large, and for that reason they belong in a world capital, which London is today more than it ever has been, and Athens will never be. For that matter the classical tradition of modern Greece does not go beyond the well-meaning posturing of Otto I, the Bavarian king placed on the Greek throne after the expulsion of the Turks. The idea of stripping the Acropolis back to its remains of the Fifth Century B.C., reconstructing them, and making them a national shrine was Klenze’s, who did not fail to create an approximate clone of it in Munich’s Königsplatz. The War for Independence brought Greece nationhood, not a renascence of Athenian democracy, and it re-emerged as a minor European monarchy. Therefore, in losing the Parthenon Sculptures, the Greeks have lost a nationalist symbol, however suggestive its associations with democracy might be.

What do the Parthenon Sculptures mean for us anyway? Supposedly they were part of a thank-offering for the goddess Athena, patron of Athens, for saving the Greeks from the Persians. The sculptures depict mythological subjects like the Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, but above all, on the pediments, Athenian foundation-myths, and on the frieze, an Athenian ritual, which may also be a mythological representation—in other words, nationalistic subjects. In all the acrimony over where the marbles belong and the hypocritical reverence it inspires, few mention the air of corruption associated with their creation. To put it very briefly and excessively simply, the Athenians, as leaders of the Greeks in the Second Persian War (480-79 B.C.), transformed the Delian League, the alliance of Greek states formed to prevent another Persian invasion, into a structure for controlling and exploiting the other members. The Parthenon was begun in 448, two years after the Peace of Callias, which obviated the purpose of the League. However, it was not dissolved, its headquarters—and most importantly, its treasury— were transferred to Athens, and the Athenians continued to demand tribute money from the “allies.” There is some evidence that funds contributed for security were diverted to the building project on the Acropolis, but we don’t know to what extent. However, it is clear that the Athenians enriched themselves through their hegemony (a dirty word today) and spent much of their ill-gotten gains on their triumphalist (another bad word) artistic campaign, controversial in its own time, according to Plutarch. If our ancestors had been better people, we wouldn’t have what remains of the Acropolis and its art anywhere.

On the other hand, Lord Elgin’s removal of the Marbles was surrounded by criticism from the start, above all, from rivals who would have most likely done the same thing themselves, if he hadn’t beaten them to it. There is no denying that Lord Elgin’s workmen did serious damage. Moreover, the firman which granted him certain rights in regard to the sculptures, which only survives in an Italian translation made by the Ottomans for Lord Elgin, is extremely vague in its terms. On the other hand there is no question that the sculptures were well out of the way during the Greek War of Independence, and it even seems that the London fog and the BM’s nineteenth century heating system were lesser evils than the twentieth century smog of Athens. Yet again, Lord Duveen’s interference in the cleaning of the sculptures prior to their installation in the gallery he endowed, is a horror, and so is his gallery, but not entirely: camera-laden tourists, American Evangelical tours, enthusiasts and scholars can co-exist there as happily as in Victoria Station. (Tschumi’s unfinished New Acropolis Museum appears to be no less oppressive and may well seem dated before it even opens.) But above all the interpretation of the sculptures as a symbol of Greek nationalist sentiment only trivializes their message.

I have considered mostly questions of education and availability here. Is not Sir Hans Sloane’s vision eminently well fulfilled when an overseas visitor, a scholar on his way to work in another department of the BM, or an office worker on his or her lunch break can all visit the Parthenon Sculptures easily and free of charge, meanwhile walking through galleries populated by the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures among which the Greeks co-existed—although, to be sure, uncomfortably enough with the Persians. In this way, the encyclopedic museum does its work on even the least aware among its visitors. While material ownership and the responsibilities of stewardship devolve on the British Museum, in a higher sense the sculptures belong to no one. If the British were at all inclined to offer the Greeks some sort of recompense, it would be more constructive and appropriate for our times, if they were to offer the Greeks a Tate Mediterranean and to populate it with rotating loans from the Tate’s collection. Modern day Greeks, in spite of Onassis, Niarchos and their descendants, and the Eurotrash invasion of the Aegean, are not the cosmopolites they were in the days of Odysseus and Herodotus.[4] The world has grown larger, and the Hellenic realm more circumscribed. Some exposure to Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, Blake, Millais, Spencer, Lewis, Bacon, Hirst, and Ofili might help to correct this. A devout Greek Orthodox might well derive more intellectual stimulation from seeing shit on a holy icon than the average New Yorker.[5] Or perhaps the British Council should dispatch Banksy to Athens on a secret goodwill mission.

---

[1] In this way works of art depicting in part a ritual have encouraged a ritual in its viewers. As favorite—or classic—works of art become more familiar to us, we owe it to ourselves to attempt to look at them with fresh eyes. The encyclopedic museum helps us in this by giving us an unparalleled opportunity to create fresh contexts of our own for our viewing. However, it is nearly impossible—and perhaps unnecessary—to deritualize the experience of looking. Our museums are like the temples of the ancient Greeks not only in their columns and pediments, but in their role as storehouses of valued and numinous objects, valuable things, some made of precious materials, which have been purified of their exchange value by passing into a permanent repository of a god or the state. The awe some visitors feel in their presence is often derived from this apotheosized value. Perhaps this is not unrelated to the twinge of righteous indignation which for some is a part of a visit to the Duveen Gallery.

[2] As an antidote to many current popular notions about British “imperialists” and Asian culture I recommend, Charles Allen’s excellent The Buddha and the Sahibs (American title: The Search for the Buddha).

[3] It is important to remember that she came from a family of politicians, but it is also a good idea to remember that their socialist agenda has little to do with Athenian democracy or any other ancient Greek political structures.

[4] The recently published Landmark Herodotus and the discussions surrounding it have inspired some curious, politically correct notions about the Father of History, which I also hope to address in a review.

[5] This is of course unfair to Mr. Ofili, whose work I admire. In fact he is ideally suited to address the mythical and religious ideas associated with the Parthenon. Phidias’ lost chryselephantine Athena Parthenos cries out for a contemporary coprelephantine response.