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Return antiquities? The debate, rarely absent from our newspapers these days, over who has the right to own and exhibit the spartan physical remnants of classical civilisation is, it seems to me, all one way. Liberal opinion, informed as it is more by self-inflicted guilt than reason, as well as by the cowardly stupidities of Political Correctness, tells us that the West’s museums should return key works to where they came from. (By the way, have you too noticed how ‘key’ always means the best: even when it’s from the Acropolis or another alleged sanctum sanctorum they never want back the worst.) To return material, this ‘argument’ runs, would be magnanimous, the only decent thing to do, a symbol of global fraternity, an altruistic reparation for the vandalism which caused these “national” treasures to be carted off in the first place. My own experience convinces me that the opposite is in fact true. More sculpture should be exported from the former colonies of the Greek, Persian and Roman Empires. Art should not be concentrated in places where the resources for conservation and research are limited, where the audiences are non-existent and where they already own far more sculptural wealth than could ever be placed on display. All the Mediterranean countries now have rigid embargoes on the export of archaeological material despite the fact that they already have so much of it they can not only not exhibit it all, or anywhere near it, but what there is is kept often in a shockingly inadequate state. I wish to suggest here that Greece and Turkey in particular, far from legally preventing the dispersal of classical art, should encourage controlled export of sculpture, perhaps on extended loan, leasehold or even sale, to western museums where there are the scholars to curate and comprehensively catalogue the material and where there is a large audience – a huge and often passionately interested one in the case of the British Museum – to admire and be inspired by it. Such a policy is more likely to encourage tourism to Turkey than is the concentration of material in, for example, the Archaeological Museum of Antalya where the lucky visitor can spend hours quite alone. Imperfect as some argue the British Museum is, it has surpassed most other institutions in opening the eyes of tens of millions to the fascination and beauty of the classical empires’ artefacts and archaeological sites. One simple fact deserves to be stated unashamedly: we in the West care more for and are better at exhibiting to the greatest number the greatest objects of the past. The rest of the world should not be execrating our museums for imagined peccadillos in the past but prostrating themselves in gratitude for the incalculable debt they owe to us. Having just returned from Turkey, a country I’ve been visiting regularly for 25 years, I am convinced that far from being vandals, the likes of Sir Charles Fellowes, director of the British Museum and the excavator of Xanthos in the 1840s, were little short of heroes. Their motives and superior attitudes to their hosts may in some instances have been questionable, but by recognising the importance and preserving the works of Greek and Roman sculptors and architects, they did history and learning an incalculably important turn. Without Fellowes the remarkable pillar tombs of Xanthos would undoubtedly have been lost to quarry, loot and casual vandalism because the small kingdoms that formed the richest lands of successive empires are now home to the poorest and most educationally disadvantaged of Europe. Why have I always yearned to visit Xanthos? The answer is because of the sales spiel provided by the British Museum, but also undoubtedly, in small part, it is because the very name casts a romantic spell. In my case, many lunch hours spent in the British Museum escaping the dreariest of pen-pushing desk jobs has played its part. I have long been curious to see for myself the site of the Nereid monument, a miniature ionic tomb with ranges of reliefs whose design nods acquaintance to the Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis. Its remarkable sculptures depict dancing temptresses, probably 16 of them originally, in which marble magically, joyfully defies its weight and mass. Far from looking as if they were carved, the sculptural form of these seductive creatures seems more to have been arrived at by softening the stone and stretching, bending and looping it like soft toffee. More than any other sculptures I love these wrecked figures which, over the years, have become for me the epitome of beauty and art. Xanthos was the capital of Lycia, one of the wealthiest provinces of the ancient world. Its relative stability and prosperity was at least in part due to the realpolitik of its leaders in not resisting the irresistible forces of militarily superior invaders: kings did deals and divvied up from the treasure chest. The region’s wealth was based on the richness of its soils. It grew wood in abundance for ship-building, but specialised in exporting perfumes, especially rose oil. Here flowers are in profusion. Its high mountains, which are tipped with snow even when on the coastal strip the temperature exceeds a hundred degrees, are stocked with marble and other minerals and, most importantly, bottomless reserves of fresh water. Its coastal plains, punctuated by magnificent ancient cities every seven to ten miles along the coast (the Roman army considered seven miles to be half-a-day’s march), are among the most fertile of the Mediterranean. Had refrigeration existed in Hadrian’s day, the Eastern Roman Empire would have been handsomely provisioned by this agrarian paradise. Now we do have refrigeration, the plain overseen by Xanthos is under intensive greenhouse cultivation producing winter tomatoes, aubergines, capsicums, cucumbers and chillis for Germany, Britain and the Gulf States. The alluvial plains of Croesus’s Lycia now supply Tescos with unseasonal veg.. Xanthos occupies a promontory above a plain from which visual contact with the towns of Letoön and Patara on the nearby coastal estuary was possible. The city follows an urban plan familiar to those keen dilettantes who have dutifully explored ancient sites. It is worth remembering that the Greek and Roman Empires were in essence elaborate protection rackets which sold franchises: the McNuggets and theatres of Verulamium and Ostia were identical to those of Phaselis and Aspendos. Xanthos is a ruin and ruins are ruins, places of negligible clues where informed speculation, intelligent supposition and reined fantasy rule. A thousand years of history, of war and rebuilding, are conflated often incoherently into a single ground plan, but no other springboard allows greater imaginative escape. The base of the Nereid tomb overhangs the steep slope down to the plain. Fifty yards away, across the narrow modern road snaking beneath it, is the tented market of Kirik, a modern forum and basilica in which the region’s farming families purchase everything from second-hand tractor parts to woven plastic matting and fat bundles of medicinal herbs – all in a fug of diesel smoke belched from rusty wagons which are strangers to the MOT bay. Little is left of the pedestal of the Nereid tomb except a readable platform foundation and a tumble of lizard-infested, dislodged blocks. In its finished pristine state the monument would have been imposing and visible from afar: a 4th century BC traveller from the east would have been able to see its sunlit stone fully half a day before arriving at the gates. Though hardly monumental it was nevertheless conspicuously located and clearly commemorated an important person – the BM reckons one Arbinas. We have every reason to suspect that its sculpture is the work of an eminent carver: it couldn’t be anything else. Certainly, this work was renowned enough for it to cause echoes in figures made five hundred years later, eight cities along the coast, in the 2nd century sculpture yards of Perge. Being there undoubtedly heightens appreciation. Stand close behind the Nereid plinth and overlay the British Museum’s reconstruction, then look right to the later Roman theatre and other tall pillar tombs and back to the city’s colonnaded main streets now little more than tracks, and the past twitches with life. Future visits to the Nereid tomb in the BM will be more vivid than before. What would happen if, in a fit of sentimental stupidity one couldn’t put beyond a weak opportunist like our Prime Minister, the captivating dancers of the British Museum were sent home? Obviously, they wouldn’t be returned to their plinth, let alone exhibited anywhere near Xanthos. The one certainty of ruins is that there won’t be a sculpture in sight worth a second look. This regrettable policy of removal makes sense; sculptures get stolen, worn away without their protective niches and carelessly damaged, defaced, beheaded or pushed over by souvenir hunters or indifferent locals. The Nereid monument would end up in the regional archaeological museum of Antalya or (by droit de seigneur) in Istanbul or Ankara. Antalya, itself the home of an impressive Roman gateway, straddles the kingdoms of Lycia and Pamphyllia. The best sculpture discovered at sites from Xanthos to Side are housed here in a museum which is just about open: there are no staff, no guards, no catalogue, a closed café and a locked interior courtyard crowded with figure sculptures roped tightly in plastic awaiting ... whatever. A liberal estimate of the afternoon attendance during the busiest time of year would be a dozen. There is no persuasive argument here for the restitution of objects. Interestingly, in a large gallery well stocked with ornately-lidded sarcophagi from the Greek and Roman periods are two tombs which, having been illegally excavated, were secretly sold in the 1990s to the Getty and Brooklyn Museums. Identified as smuggled they have now been returned. How many Lycian tombs do you need in a museum when the countryside is littered with them and within twenty miles of the museum, on the remote slopes below the mountainous acropolis of Termessos, there is a wooded necropolis containing dozens of such tombs, many toppled and crudely broken into by centuries of robbers? Illicit export is not to be encouraged but the tombs returned to Antalya were more potentially productive of scholarship in America. There is housed in the Antalya Museum an astonishing collection of statuary mainly from Perge, its theatre, Roman gateway and nymphaeum. The sculpture is of a distinctive character involving draped female figures (see opposite page), probably based on a depiction of Vibia Sabina, Hadrian’s wife. Each appears to be wrestling with the straitjackets of their enveloping draperies. I’ve never met this style before, and there are many examples of it here in good and bad accounts, for some masons were better than others, fluent originators as opposed to bog standard copiers. This indicates that as the city prospered under Pax Romana a vigorous sculpture yard must have operated here throughout the second century. The rhythms of bunched folds and tightly clinging material, and of billowing loops in Perge’s own rare dancing figures, testify to the peculiar and inexplicable allure of these forms when cut in stone. (Among other irrelevances this made me realise that there are no great carvings of a man in a suit or a woman wearing a twinset. Perhaps the visual failure of modern public statuary is the sculptural inappropriateness to stone and bronze of modern fashion.) Heaven only knows what tonnage of material from so many rich sites is stored by the Antalya Museum. I can see no case for not sharing or selling this surfeit of stimulating, didactic work. The British Museum advertises history and induces in visitors the desire for adventurous travel. Singularly, it is capable of arousing scholarly interest in non-scholars. Countries eager to encourage tourism should be exporting the surplus which currently they hoard so possessively while exhorting us to show more of their art, not less. David Lee | |||||
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