(gentle music)
- [Steven] We're in London at the British Museum,
standing in a gallery devoted
to the sculpture of the Parthenon.
- [Beth] This is a gallery that was designed
to house these sculptures which arrived
at the British Museum in the early 19th century.
Now we're looking at some of the most revered sculpture
in all of Western art.
- [Steven] These sculptures were seen
as the High Classical style that for hundreds of years
we believed we could only hope to re-achieve.
These sculptures and the building that it came from
the Parthenon, are more than 2,000 years old.
But the controversy of how these sculptures
ended up in London is more than 200 years old.
- [Beth] What we're looking at are sculptures
that are divorced from the building
that they came from, the Parthenon.
- [Steven] But they were integral to it
and it's impossible to divorce the meaning
of these sculptures from their original context.
- [Beth] Let's spend a minute looking at one of the panels
from the frieze of the Parthenon and why these sculptures
and this classical moment of ancient Greece
have been so revered in Western art.
The sculptures on the frieze depict a procession,
mostly of horses and riders.
- [Steven] And look at the naturalism here.
The artists have been examining the anatomy
of the nude male, but also of the horse.
Look at the way in which the man's thigh bulges out
as it presses against the horse.
You can see the concavity of the hip bone.
Look at the way that the artist
has carefully depicted the twisting of the body.
The legs are moving forward, but the chest turns to face us.
- [Beth] We can see the ribcage, we can see the muscles
in the abdomen, the muscles in the shoulders and the arms.
That love of anatomy that we know from ancient Greek art.
Whereas the horse on the right rears up
and has a sense of passion and energy,
the human figures have a calm nobility.
- [Steven] After the French Revolution,
Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power.
France had been expanding it's territory,
but under Napoleon, it begins a campaign
to conquer much of Europe.
- [Beth] It's against this background
that the sculpture in this room is taken from Athens
and makes its way to London.
The other important context here is the interest
in ancient Greek and Roman antiquities
that just explodes in the 18th century.
You have Napoleon not only conquering territories
but bringing scholars with him to help him identify
important works of art, important monuments,
that he brings back to France to fill the new Musee Napoleon
which becomes the Louvre Museum.
So you have this competition among European powers
for the great works of classical antiquity.
- [Steven] So the man responsible for bringing
these sculptures from Athens to London,
Lord Elgin, was a Scottish nobleman.
And he received an extremely important diplomatic mission.
He became ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
- [Beth] And he became ambassador at a critical moment
when the British had just won a decisive battle in Egypt
so the balance of power shifted away from France.
- [Steven] So for the Ottomans, the French were out
and the British were in.
And Elgin was the primary representative
of the British Crown, which gave him tremendous power.
Now from the beginning Elgin imagined that he could help
develop the arts of Britain.
- [Beth] And what better way to do that than to furnish
the British public with examples of this great moment
in Western sculpture, the sculptures from the Parthenon.
His first idea was to create copies, to make molds
and to have artists draw.
His motivation was certainly personal in terms
of decorating his home in the antique style,
but it was also generous, it was also educational.
- [Steven] He asked the British government for funding
to help support this artistic endeavor.
They declined, but Elgin went ahead anyway
and he hired a team that he sent to Athens.
Now the building had a long, complex history
and was built as a temple to the goddess Athena,
but then it had been turned into a church
and eventually it had been turned into a mosque.
But the Ottomans also stored gunpowder there
and when they were attacked by the Venetians
the building exploded.
- [Beth] Leaving debris across the Acropolis.
When Elgin's team wanted to begin their work
they encountered some problems
from the local Ottoman authorities.
And so they asked Elgin back in Constantinople
to secure for them a firman or a permit
which would allow them to do the work on the Acropolis.
The very first firman or permit doesn't survive
but the second firman has come down to us in translation.
It describes what Elgin's men were allowed to do.
It says.
- [Steven] They were allowed to draw and they were allowed
to cast, they were allowed to erect scaffolding.
- [Beth] And they were allowed to excavate.
But the critical passage of this firman or this permit
reads, "No one should meddle with their scaffolding
or implements nor hinder them from taking away
any pieces of stone with inscriptions or figures."
And it's that last phrase that reads somewhat ambiguously.
What happens is Elgin's men see an opportunity,
through cajoling, through bribery,
through using the power of Elgin's office to extend
the interpretation of this firman enough to allow them
to take sculpture from the Parthenon itself.
- [Steven] And the act of removing the sculpture
was necessarily an act of destruction.
- [Beth] This is a difficult and expensive endeavor
and Elgin is laying out his own money to do this.
- [Steven] In fact, he's borrowing
to be able to afford this project.
- [Beth] He took 247 of the 524 feet of the frieze.
He took 15 metopes out of 92
and he took 17 sculptures from the pediment.
Now we're just talking about sculptures from the Parthenon,
there were many other things that he took.
- [Steven] By this time he was in deep debt
and he offered to sell the sculptures
to the British government.
- [Beth] He basically had no choice.
Even storing them was enormously expensive.
- [Steven] The British government convened
a parliamentary commission to investigate the circumstances
of the acquisition and to determine the quality
of the sculpture and to settle on a price.
- [Beth] Ultimately the government did decide
that the sculptures were acquired legally
and they paid Elgin 35,000 pounds,
less than half of what he estimated his own costs to be.
- [Steven] But from the very beginning, there was real
criticism leveled against Elgin for removing the sculptures
from Greece and for the destruction
that that necessarily caused.
- [Beth] And soon after the arrival of the Elgin marbles
here in Britain, Greece finally achieves independence
from the Ottoman Empire and these sculptures
and the Parthenon itself and the buildings on the Acropolis,
become a symbol of national identity for the Greeks.
- [Steven] And the Greeks ask for the marbles back.
- [Beth] So where does that leave us today?
The argument that Elgin's actions were illegal.
- [Steven] Although his critics state that in fact
he exceeded his legal authority, there's also the argument
that is persuasive for many, that Elgin although
doing damage to the building and to many of the sculptures
ultimately preserved the sculptures.
- [Beth] Before Elgin got there, the French were taking
sculptures from the Parthenon.
So you have not only the French taking things,
you have tourists who are picking things up
off the Acropolis or buying things from local inhabitants.
Everyone wanted a piece of the monuments on the Acropolis.
- [Steven] But the counter-argument there is strong also,
Elgin actually destroyed the temple in part
to remove the sculptures.
The sculptures themselves suffered
and in a number of cases were exposed to seawater.
And the British Museum does not have an unblemished role
in protecting the sculptures either.
In the early 20th century,
they were responsible for an overzealous cleaning.
- [Beth] There's also another argument that's often made
that if the marbles were sent back,
it would have a kind of ripple effect
and so many of the objects that are in encyclopedic museums
in the West, like the Louvre,
like the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
like the British Museum,
would also need to be sent back to their place of origin.
- [Steven] The Greeks have built a beautiful modern museum
designed especially to house these objects.
- [Beth] And we could finally have the opportunity
to see them all together.
- [Steven] If they were returned, we would also see them
closer to their original context,
we could look out those magnificent glass windows
to the Acropolis itself to see these objects
in that brilliant Mediterranean sunlight.
- [Beth] Another critical argument made for keeping
the sculptures here is that the British Museum
is a universal museum.
- [Steven] And so here it's possible to compare
ancient Greek art with ancient Assyrian art,
with ancient Egyptian art, with art from East Asia,
with art from Africa.
And there is real benefit to that.
- [Beth] You could say that the collections
of the British Museum promote tolerance
and cross-cultural understanding.
That we understand the objects in the British Museum
as being owned by humanity broadly.
- [Steven] Except that it just happens to be in the capital
of one of the world's great former empires.
- [Beth] And an empire that committed violent acts
against its colonies.
And while the Greeks make the argument that the sculptures
are a central part of Greek identity, there are those
that argue that the Greeks of ancient Athens are completely
different Greeks than the Greeks of the modern era.
- [Steven] But the Parthenon is distinct
and it's different in part because it's not only
deeply important to the Greeks, it has become deeply
important to American culture, to British culture,
to French culture, to a kind of global culture.
What the ancient Greeks did in Athens in the 5th century
has had the most profound impact on modern society
that this culture has been embraced universally.
The classical art historian archeologist Mary Beard
puts this just beautifully.
- [Beth] She wrote, "The debate that surrounds
"the Elgin Marbles forces us to face the unanswerable
"question of who can, and should, own the monument.
"Can a single monument act as a symbol both of nationhood
"and of world culture?"
So how do we reconcile the universal meaning
of these sculptures, the meaning that we've given them,
that these sculptures stand for democracy.
- [Steven] And for the nobility of humankind.
- [Beth] How do we balance that with the fact
that it was indeed the Greeks who made this
incredible contribution to Western civilization?
(upbeat piano music)