Elgin Marbles: Osborne on 'deal to be done' with Greece
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Few things in the British Museum’s unrivalled collection of wondrous objects have been as influential as the gleaming white array of marble sculptures removed from the Parthenon in Athens more than 200 years ago on the orders of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin.
When they arrived in London in the early 19th Century the “Elgin Marbles” – now known as the Parthenon Marbles – became the bedrock of English and, by extension, Western culture, firing the imaginations of scholars, artists, architects, writers, potters and Romantic poets.
Generations of museum trustees and politicians have refused to countenance any suggestion they properly belong in Athens where they began life 2,450 years ago. But what we see on display at the London museum is misleading, say experts, because the marbles were never meant to be white.
On the day long ago that they were first unveiled in Athens they would have appeared in glorious Technicolor. That colourful past was wiped clean by millennia of erosion on the exposed plateau of the Acropolis, a massive explosion when the temple was used as an ammunition store – and over-enthusiastic conservation.
But computer technology, a robot sculptor and a possible deal with Greece, which has been trying to recover its country’s great treasures, may mean they will soon be seen in a different light.
The sculptures and bas reliefs – a series of three-dimensional panels known as metopes – have come to represent the summit of ancient Greek civilisation, the artistic peak on which much of Western civilisation is built.
Images of the marbles were even adopted by racists, from Adolf Hitler to America’s largest online neo-Nazi network Stormfront, to claim the direct descent from ancient Greece of white northern Europeans.
It has been suspected for two centuries that they were originally highly coloured but until recently little effort has been put into investigating their original appearance.
One of the few to challenge this preconception was the Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema who depicted the marbles’ creator, the sculptor Phidias, showing off the Parthenon frieze to his friends. In Alma-Tadema’s picture, the figures in the frieze are all painted in naturalistic skin colours.
In the mid-1830s the British Museum, which acquired the marbles for the nation after Elgin sold them to pay for his divorce, set up the Polychrome Committee to examine the question of whether the marbles were originally painted. But by then they had been scrubbed clean of any trace of the original finish.
The conclusion that they had always been white may have been shaped by a desire not to be blamed for damage caused by museum staff using bleach and wire brushes on them shortly after their arrival in London.
The only dissenter was Michael Faraday, the greatest scientist of his age, who detected traces of wax that may have once been used to colour parts of the sculptures. The abrasive and damaging cleaning was repeated 100 years later to remove soot deposited by London’s millions of chimneys.
The damage caused has been used to challenge the museum’s insistence that it is the safest place to keep such historic objects.
Exact copies of two of the museum’s marbles are currently being carved by a robot sculptor in Carrera, Italy. They will go on display at an undisclosed location in London later this month as “proof of concept” that replicas can be indistinguishable from the originals, opening the door to a deal with the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
The Greek government has, for almost the first time, allowed Pentelic marble from the original quarry near Athens to be used to create the replicas. But exact copies of the sculptures, stained and chipped as they are now, are not the only objects being created.
A second copy will be made of the original appearance, with any damage repaired and colour – determined using the latest scientific techniques – applied.
Far from being white, the figures in the original frieze would have had skin tones ranging from olive to black. There are unlikely to have been many pale complexions among ancient Athens’s inhabitants.
One of the objects being replicated is the lifesize marble head of a horse that once pulled a chariot carrying the sun along the frieze.
It is one of the most revered and recognisable objects in the British Museum. The sweat-flecked skin and bulging eyes perfectly depict the effort required for this great daily enterprise.
If the horse appears familiar it is because it was used as the model for the Staunton chess set Knight, the standard for tournaments and chess clubs since 1849.
The objects were photographed and digitally recorded by two researchers from the Oxford-based Institute for Digital Archaeology which believes these important cultural artefacts belong where they stood for more than 2,000 years, on the Acropolis which towers over Athens.
They used iPhones and iPads to covertly record 3D images to a fraction of a millimetre after permission to do so officially was refused.
Now the IDA believes its work has played a part in unblocking the diplomatic logjam that prevented the museum contemplating returning any of the marbles to Greece.
Roger Michel, executive director, said that when the project started six months ago no one believed the museum would budge. Yet last week George Osborne, the former Chancellor now chairman of the Trustees, said he believes “there is a deal to be done”.
Speculation about that deal intensified when earlier this month, South London’s Horniman Museum said it will transfer ownership of 72 artefacts looted by British forces in 1897, including stunning ancient Benin Bronzes, to the Nigerian government.
Now Mr Michel believes the possibility of creating a second or even possibly a third, fully restored, set, could be integral to securing any deal.
Reuniting the “Elgin” Marbles with the bits left behind, and which are now in the Acropolis museum, would be a lure that might prove irresistible if both museums could have a full set, restored or unrestored. Seeing the marbles as they originally were could also prove enlightening.
Mr Michel said: “The marbles helped create this idea that white culture can be traced directly back to antiquity and the science, culture, literature and poetry of ancient Greece. The English in the 19th Century adopted the history of antiquity as their own history.
“Look at Wedgwood and Chippendale, look at furniture and pottery, look at the architects who designed the buildings, they all use classical motifs.
“Somehow the art, literature and aesthetics of antiquity got embroidered into British culture in this powerful way and a big part of that is the whiteness of these statues.”
The idea that classical statues should be pure white is so deeply ingrained, museum visitors say they prefer the myth to the reality: that most Greek and Roman statues were painted to look more lifelike.
Roman senators would throw parties where slaves would sit as still as statues among marble figures before coming to life and startling the party goers. It was the classical equivalent of the “living statue” buskers.
Mr Michel said: “Starting in the 1830s there was a concerted effort to cement this myth of whiteness and it continues to this day. It’s almost more shocking today because we know that these things were garishly coloured.
“In the 19th Century some kind of weird alchemy happened whereby the history and culture of antiquity got unmoored from reality and was put into floors, china, furniture and adopted as their own. Britain soaked up the culture of classical antiquity. But England is not descended from Greece, it lies in northern Europe, not in the Mediterranean.”
It was not just England. Hitler tried to deny Germany’s past. He claimed: “While our ancestors lived in caves and worked with flints, the Greeks were building the Parthenon. When asked about our ancestry, we must always point to the Greeks.”
Mr Michel points out: “The Greeks themselves are quite swarthy and the Greeks of antiquity were quite swarthy too, as anyone who has read the Odyssey knows. Homer described Odysseus as “dark-skinned”.
“The Greeks of today don’t look like the statues which provided the basis for disassociating current-day Greeks from the builders of the Parthenon.”
Jonathan Williams, deputy director of the British Museum, said recently that the institution was eager to “change the temperature of the debate” over the marbles and wanted a “positive partnership” with Greece. Whether technological advances will help remains to be seen.
Mr Michel and his technical director Dr Alexy Karenowska are working on a virtual reality app that will make it possible to see restored and recoloured versions of the marbles simply by holding a smartphone up to what remains of the originals.
They say it will be the difference between a black and white movie and one in Technicolor. By creating what they believe to be exact replicas the Parthenon will be brought back to life and visitors would want to see that, they believe.
If and when the Parthenon Marbles are accurately replicated it may lay to rest one of the most persistent Greek myths of them all.
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