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The first flowering The study of classical art and of Classics in general is very unfashionable. According to recent newspaper reports it is no longer economical to teach and examine Latin and Greek. These subjects seem to be victims of the desire in education to eliminate all difficulty and exclusiveness from learning. For every thousand people who know the name of Damien Hirst, and who believe they are informed about art on account of it, there are probably fifty who could name a work by Michelangelo, five who would know where to find the Gates of Paradise, and (at a pinch and excepting the Venus de Milo) one who could name a single piece of antique sculpture. It seems that the further back you go the less informed people appear to be and the fewer still are those who actually know anything about it. Eventually, as these remaining few die out, we’ll draw a line under the past, say around 1250, write off everything prior to that and start the clock again. Awareness and interest, it seems, are in every walk of life skewed heavily and uncritically in favour of the contemporary. Even the Secretary of State for Education – Education – considers Medieval History an indulgence for which the hapless devotee ought to pay himself. Heaven knows what he’d think of a teenager keen to devote years to the temples of Agrigento or the relief sculpture of Babylon. Enjoyment of history and the past is interpreted even in official circles nowadays as evidence only of a pathetic and effete avoidance of the present. This is particularly true of art where ‘Contemporary’ rules as a monopoly. To be progressive and forward-looking is all that counts. Any other loyalty is deeply suspect. It has always mystified me why a dull-witted charlatan like Tracey Emin should be considered more contemporary, more capable of arousing responses and worthy of study, than a 2500-year-old statue of an athlete. This obsession with the immediately contemporary is a sad deceit, an unhealthy obsession. The best art of whatever period is always contemporary because human thoughts, anxieties and feelings have demonstrably not altered much in recent millennia. We find ourselves in a situation where not only are some artists unjustly more promoted than others but, apparently, certain types of knowledge are more desirable and valuable than others too. Being about as far from contemporary art as you can get, classical sculpture is one such overlooked subject precisely because it is difficult to understand and, at least on a superficial level, irrelevant to modern life. I’m convinced that this general ignorance of classical sculpture, its sheer distance from us and resistance to being easily understood, is at the root of the reason why the likes of Robin Cook, Bill Clinton, Ken Livingstone and other clever media addicts lend support to the campaign for the restitution to Athens of the Parthenon marbles. Their arguments lack any conviction or cogency and one strongly suspects that their first-hand experience of the sculptures is at best through either the swiftest of perfunctory visits to Bloomsbury or, more likely, derived from an emotive television documentary in which half-truths are passed off as facts. Over 30 years of visiting the British Museum I’ve come to understand and love from experience the truth of the argument presented first by Robert Adamson and more recently by his successor as Director of the British Museum, Neil McGregor, that the importance of the Parthenon marbles in the context of other works in the BM is unique, profound and unrepeatable elsewhere. This argument is easy to dismiss because we art faggots would say that, but I know – I know – that Christopher Hitchens’ convenient claim that the Elgin Marbles’ removal to London was “a loss to sculpture and scholarship” could not be further from the truth. On the contrary, the scholarly argument, which will be understood only by those fanatical enough to study with patience and humility the evolution of sculpture during unquestionably its greatest two centuries, is the most important one against restitution. Although this is the most compelling reason, it is the one least likely to convince. Few will empathise with it because few have learned to see classical sculpture. It is, alas, an argument exclusively the preserve of the art lover. Before attempting to describe the thrills of those west wing rooms to which the Parthenon marbles are central, I want to rehearse as fairly as possible the other pros and cons most frequently deployed in the debate. The commonest argument for the return of the Elgin Marbles is that they were illegally acquired in the first place. Though I have serious reservations about the honesty of Elgin’s stated, saintly motives in removing them, not to mention his own optimistic interpretation of the Sultan’s ambiguous authorisation, there is not a court in Europe which would find against the British Museum’s legal ownership of these works. Even the Greek authorities have now realised that contesting title is a non-starter. “The marbles are best seen and understood in the context of the Parthenon for which they were made.” Such a glib utterance, one familiar from Cook to Clinton, convinces for upwards of the time it takes to read it. It is seductive as sentiment but far from persuasive as argument. It might be more convincing if two-fifths of the Parthenon frieze and a large proportion on one pediment were not already in Athens giving a flavour of what the Parthenon was like when it was completed in 432BC. Precisely how helpful is it, really, to have all the sculptures in the same place? The answer is extremely useful to scholars but an irrelevance to everyone else. None of the Parthenon’s sculptures now resembles in any way what first appeared on the building. To start with, the iconography is uncertain. The precise meaning, therefore, not to mention their exact ordering on the building, has proved elusive. Additionally, all the colour, gilding, weaponry and the white-deadening toning which we know was applied to the blinding raw marble have been removed. The truth is that we cannot begin to imagine today either the full significance of the sculptures in terms of their original meaning or, most critically, of their original appearance. And if we could we might be disappointed. Am I alone in not regretting the loss of Pheidias’s ghastly-sounding, gigantic chryselephantine Athena housed in the Parthenon’s cella and what must have been the gaudy spectacle of the same building’s brightly polychromed frieze high up in the half light of an inner passage? If we could see them precisely as designed and executed we might consider them more appropriate to Disneyland than to a fully paid up Wonder of the World. No, give me our present fragments any day. We use all the sculptures of ancient Greece, such as they have survived, for our own purposes, purposes almost always unrelated to the largely unknown reasons why many of them were made. We should not confuse what we see and love now with how ancient audiences saw and interpreted the finished and pristine pieces. Using this same argument would not all the sculptures of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus be better reunited in one place – Bodrum say – so that western Europe’s bonk-happy rednecks and the local Carian peasantry could see and imagine the greatest sculpted monument in the history of western art, upon which, furthermore, four of the greatest ever sculptors were said to have competed? I don’t believe either tourist or Turk would be remotely interested, and I don’t believe they care. They have other concerns and pastimes to which they are welcome and in whose regulation I have no interest. Try for a second to imagine the reality of this argument. What good accrues when seeing all of the Acropolis sculptures together in a building which is a mile from the one for which they were made? At this point we should remember that the Elgin Marbles comprise pieces from two Acropolis buildings other than the Parthenon, namely the Erechtheum, whose caryatid porch is familiar to those who pass the crude simulacrum of it adorning St Pancras Church on Euston Road, and Callicrates’ marvellous and architecturally influential little jewel, the Temple of Athena Nike. Does any worse understanding of the frieze sculptures, for example, accrue because in the British Museum the Parthenon and the Acropolis are present only as photographs and plans rather than as the pentelic marble reality? I can’t believe it matters at all for these works to be seen near to the sad shell of the building for which they were made, any more than I need to know the precise location of Masaccio’s Pisa Altarpiece whose central panel only is in the National Gallery and whose remaining main components and predella are also, like the Acropolis sculptures, dispersed throughout half a dozen museums worldwide. There is another claim that the Elgin Marbles are a special case because they are somehow co-existent with Greek identity – in short, that they mean more to the Greeks than to anyone else. This is certainly untrue of when they were made. The Acropolis was a specifically Athenian statement not a Greek one, although it was built perhaps fraudulently using allies’ money. I can’t help thinking that in the incessant wars between those mainland city states beyond the tiny Attican promontory, the armies of Delphi, Sparta and Corinth would have been only too willing to follow in Persian footsteps and trash the gleaming new Acropolis. Furthermore, claims that the Athenians of Pericles and the Greeks of the European Union are somehow siblings is preposterous. The Greeks are at least as mongrel as the English are. For a modern Greek to assume racial kinship with Pericles is like my Mancunian mother claiming a close relationship to Cartimandua, the queen of the Brigantes, a Pennine Iron Age tribe. She is just as likely to be descended from a Syrian, a Spaniard, a north African, an Angle or Saxon, a Dane, Norman or Norwegian, not to mention the armies of Irish navvies who shovelled out the Ship Canal in the 19th century. Sentimental arguments born of desperation, such as that concerning a transhistorically permanent idea of Greece and Greekness, rarely withstand close scrutiny. They fail to recognise a long European history of intermixing nomadic tribes, slavery and successive colonising invasions. Another argument for the Elgin Marbles’ return is that they are in bad, uncaring hands here. It is true that in 1937 three frieze and metope panels were badly scraped using metal tools in order to satisfy that self-serving charlatan and huckster, Joseph Duveen. He was donating money for a new gallery to house them and wanted the sculptures Colgate white for the purpose. The then museum director stopped this practice as soon as he realised what was happening. It was indeed a regrettable outrage and everyone, not just the Greeks, are right to be angered by it. However, the greatly superior condition of London’s sculptures when compared to those which have remained in Athens – a difference clearly visible in photographs – is perhaps testimony to the timeliness, if crudity, of Elgin’s intervention in saving them. Those sculptures which have been in the British Museum for 187 years have fared much better than those in Athens where, so great was the pride in these national jewels, they were left outside to be corroded by the atmosphere of arguably the worst polluted city of Europe. Additionally, Greek attempts at restoration during the 20th century have been equally criticised for their insensitivity and heavy-handedness. Nor have the Greeks kept on permanent public display the Parthenon sculptures remaining in their hands. A strong whiff of opportunism pervades the Greeks’ campaign for restitution. As members of an unconscionably corrupt EU, one suspects their thinking has been informed by a belief that they might just be able to muster (or buy) sufficient support and pressure to get away with it. Elgin’s methods of removing the sculptures may horrify modern conservators, and his motives may have been more mercenary and selfish than he admitted, but he did the study of sculpture and the Greek nation an unwitting favour by bringing the Parthenon sculptures to London. They survived largely on account of him and the £39,000 of his own money he spent saving them – a sum of which, incidentally, only half was recouped by their sale to the British Museum. It is claimed that the British people are in favour of the return of the Marbles. Polls supporting this view are always conducted by expensive marketing firms working on behalf of the Greek Government. Such organisations are employed only because they are adept at framing questions which elicit the clients’ desired results. I would be equally suspicious and dismissive of a poll which concluded that the British people wish to retain the Elgin Marbles. I don’t think the ‘British people’ know what they are talking about on most subjects and I certainly don’t believe they should ever be consulted for an opinion which would inevitably be based on first-hand ignorance of the material under discussion. Once the formalities of legal title have been established, the defence for their retention in the British Museum always seems suspiciously self-justifying. None of the most used ‘pro’ arguments completely convinces. In fact, though I support them myself, defenders of the British Museum’s case can easily appear mean-spirited and imbued with the final flickerings of colonial arrogance. When pushed we point to the unquestionable truth that they are seen in London by many more than would see them in Athens. It has even been claimed that seen here they act as a form of free advertising for Greek culture and an inducement to Aegean tourism. I doubt it. People go to Greece because it’s sunny and the wine is cheap if revolting. Additionally, the Elgin Marbles have always been on show here free of charge, a generosity unmatched in Athens. They are also here secure from the earthquakes which did for the Acropolis in the first place and which only a few years ago badly rearranged the Archaeological Museum itself in Athens. It is said that to return the sculptures would establish a dangerous precedent leading to a flood of demands for the return of artefacts which other countries might then claim as indissolubly attached to their sense of national identity. This would be more convincing if many precedents hadn’t already been set. The British Museum has returned numerous artefacts already to their countries of origin, albeit nothing as significant in western terms as the Parthenon sculptures. Such a significant repatriation as the Elgin Marbles might indeed do no favours for the many museums of Western Europe which are fighting off claimants for significant parts of their collections, not to mention the other museums holding Acropolis sculptures (the Louvre, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, Vienna, Munich, Würzburg, Strasbourg, Palermo and the Vatican), who would also be placed under unfair pressure to return their fragments. For example, Turkey, the rump of the Ottoman Empire, who themselves might be asked to give back the truly astonishing Sidon sarcophagi to Lebanon, would prosecute their existing claims for the return from Berlin to Pergamum of the altar of Zeus, not to mention sculptures and architecture relating to sundry Anatolian World-Wonders also in the British Museum. None of the above reasons, either for or against, is conclusive. The only convincing argument to me is the one I’ve absorbed over the years through my eyes. It is the one which supports the idea of the museum as a story-telling sanctuary of fascinating and beautiful things, loosely connected, existing safely beyond reach of nationalistic slogans and prejudices and protected from the mitts of politicians currying favour for suspect motives. Here is the bare bones of the story, based largely upon looking in preference to reading, as it has evolved over many years in the mind, imagination and affections of one amateur. In the space of a dozen galleries of the British Museum (many of which are, shamefully, not open all at the same time), figure sculpture moves from a severe, stylised and silhouette-conscious form to the ideal of a fully three-dimensional, athletic verisimilitude. Once mastered this ideal is treated to a variety of virtuoso interpretations and twists. The sculpture industry between 500 and 300 BC – and it must have been a huge multi-national enterprise employing thousands – improved its own credibility and the status of those who made sculpture as its practitioners became confident and at ease. In most museums this story of the first great flowering of recognisably western sculpture can at best only be recounted in Roman copies, or copies of copies, made many centuries after originals whose existence is documented in texts. Here in the British Museum, this story is told mainly at first hand with the autograph touch. But even here the story has missing chapters. Primitive free-standing Greek sculpture is hardly represented. We need a major example perhaps the Greeks would loan us a full-size kouros to help complete the picture. Also, and equally regrettably, we have no large bronzes from the period because few survived Dark Age crucibles. But we do own an unparalleled collection of marble sculpture covering 150 years, which was planned and designed if not actually executed by the legendary names Pheidias, Polykleitos, Myron, Scopas, Praxiteles, Timotheus, Lysippos. The story is not a traditional one of known steps forward and of specific stylistic innovators. This is not art for a period obsessed with celebrities and art-historical conveniences. In this period knowledge can’t effectively be organised around names and a specific sequence of dated works. It is instead the most lucid of mix-ups in which truth to perfect and idealised appearance edges forward, and in which the sculptors grow visibly in ability and audacity. In the great sculptural schemes we can watch as conservative sculptors work alongside progressives. We see the best artisans of vivid, deliciously easy forms working shoulder to shoulder with hacks producing stiff, mechanical ‘types’. The story of this art, the diaspora of Pheidias’s and Polykleitos’s discoveries, is not that of the single, convenient thread. Art never ever was that tidy. As you process through the galleries, hopping across the Peloponnese from Bassae to Athens and sail through the Cyclades from Athens to Xanthos (the most wonderful sculptures of women and vividly observed animals I’ve ever seen), then up the coast to Halicarnassus and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (surely the most refined carving of a column drum anywhere), it is tempting to imagine that this figure was carved by Praxiteles or Scopas. But it makes no sense trying to identify hands. The confidence and monumentality which starts in the intricacy of the Bassae Frieze and the Parthenon pediment grows quickly into the bravura, belief and lightly worn swagger as new styles spread and the most skilful craftsmen migrate widely as individuals and teams. Here in these rooms is the fundamental vocabulary of western sculpture, the beginnings of Giovanni Pisano, Donatello and Michelangelo, the visual and practical storehouse of the Italian Renaissance. To destroy such a treasury of beautiful solutions by removing its heart would to my mind represent as much an act of vandalism as any ever perpetrated upon art. David Lee | |||||
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