The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (5 page)
Authors: Edward Hollis
And so the Parthenon, whose virgin goddess had been cast out and whose usefulness as a building had come to an abrupt end, was ruined a second time. There was one survivor. It is said that when the troops of the Holy League walked up to the remains of the Parthenon, a young virgin girl walked out of the ruins. It is not recorded what they did with her.
1816
W
HEN THE
P
ARTHENON
was in the twenty-third century of its existence, it was ruined a third time. The House of Lords sat in Parliament in the Palace of Westminster in London, and before them lay the
Petition of the Earl of Elgin, Respecting his Collection of Marbles
. Before them, indeed, stood the Earl of Elgin himself.
In his garden shed in London’s Park Lane was a jumbled heap of broken images. Once upon a time they had been beautiful and perfect and whole, but now their noses (and their heads and their hands and their feet) were missing. They were cracked and scarred and worn
down by time, and so was Lord Elgin. He stood before his peers and told them his story.
Once upon a time, he said, he had been young, and—as all young milordi should—he thirsted for improvement and politeness, beauty and truth. To learn the art of warfare, he studied Herodotus and Thucydides; for statesmanship, he read Plutarch; for wisdom, Plato and Aristotle; and for feeling, Euripides and Aeschylus.
Lord Elgin knew all about the Parthenon. The modern publications that made their way to his library showed him just how perfect the Parthenon had been. James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s
Antiquities of Athens
, the result of much scholarly measuring and excavation, illustrated the temple in a state of completeness. Pale aquatints showed the severe colonnade of eight Doric columns at each end, surmounted by an architrave and a pediment filled with the magnificent marble bodies of the ancient Athenians frozen in time. Stuart and Revett’s seductive topographical views of Athens recalled to his mind the pleasing prospect of Edinburgh Castle viewed over the Firth of Forth at sunset.
Just as Thucydides had once predicted, Lord Elgin was convinced that Athens had been mistress of a greater empire than it ever had really ruled; and he hoped that one day his own nation would come to equal, if not surpass, the greatness of that empire. He dreamed of Scotland—North Britain, he called it—as a new Hellas, and of Edinburgh as a new Athens of the North. When he was made ambassador to the court of the sultan in Constantinople, he saw himself as a modern Alcibiades, called to foreign climes in the service of a country about to taste greatness.
On his way to Constantinople, Lord Elgin collected an entourage. There was Giambattista Lusieri, a landscape painter; Feodor Ivanovitch, a Tartar freedman whose talent for figure drawing had much distinguished him at Baden-Baden; two architectural draftsmen and two molders of casts. He engaged these artificers to measure, to draw, and to make plaster copies of the antiquities of Athens, with a view to assembling a collection of sculpture, drawings, and casts that would be beneficial to the fine arts of Great Britain.
Lord Elgin and his entourage disembarked in 1800, but the
Athens they found was not the imperial capital for which they had hoped. The decrepit market town was ruled over by a provincial governor of the Ottoman sultan. The Parthenon, meanwhile, lay under the jurisdiction of the commandant of the Acropolis, which was then a fortress no less barbarous than those of Lord Elgin’s homeland.
These Turks did not appreciate the significance of the ruins that lay all around them. They treated the Parthenon more like a quarry than a building, collecting the fragments of marble and grinding them down into a dust, which they used to make lime mortar. They broke the stones into small pieces for the maze of garden walls and cottages that covered the Acropolis.
But to Lord Elgin’s horror, the British dilettanti resident in Athens were no more reverent toward the Parthenon than their Ottoman hosts. One of them, John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, wryly observed:
It is very pleasant to walk the streets here. Over almost every door is an antique statue or basso-relievo, more or less good though all much broken, so that you are in a perfect gallery of marbles in these lands. Some we steal, some we buy . . . We have just breakfasted, and are meditating a walk to the citadel, where our Greek attendant is gone to meet the workmen, and is, I hope, hammering down the Centaurs and Lapiths [from the frieze of the Parthenon] . . . Nothing like making hay when the sun shines, and when the commandant has felt the pleasure of having our sequins for a few days, I think we shall bargain for a good deal of the old temple.
He wasn’t the only one thus occupied. Just as Morritt was filching what he could, Louis Fauvel, the agent of the French ambassador to the Ottoman court, received his instructions: “Take away everything that you can. Do not neglect any opportunity to remove everything in Athens and its neighbourhood that is removeable.”
If Elgin was to “improve the arts of Great Britain,” speed was of the utmost necessity, since Napoleon’s agents had exactly the same idea in respect to their own nation. Lord Elgin left his entourage behind
in Athens and sailed on to Constantinople, hoping that he could persuade the sultan and the grand vizier to stop the French in their tracks.
He didn’t have to wait long. Napoleon was roundly defeated by the British in Egypt, and the grand vizier saw which way history was turning. On 22 July 1801 a directive from the court of the sultan appeared in Athens. The vizier’s letter ordered the commandant of the Acropolis to allow Elgin’s men:
To enter freely within the walls of the citadel, and to draw and model with plaster the ancient temples there.
Fourteen years later, some several hundred pieces of the Parthenon—the frieze of the procession of the gown, the pedimental sculptures of Athene and Poseidon and all the gods, the Lapiths and the Centaurs, and even a capital of the colonnade—were safe in London, rescued from the Turks, the dilettanti, and the French.
These sculptures had been pried off what was left of the Parthenon, dug up from the ground about it, and extracted from the cottages of the feckless peasants who still inhabited the site. They had been packed into crates and loaded onto ships. Some of the ships were captured in war, and the sculptures had to be recovered from the enemy; others of them sank, and the sculptures were salvaged from the bottom of the sea. On their journey, these marbles attracted wonder, veneration, and envy. In Rome, Lord Elgin asked Antonio Canova to restore the statues, but the sculptor refused, saying that it would be blasphemy to take his chisel to that which the hand of Phidias had touched.
Now the Parthenon lay in a shed in a back garden in Park Lane, and presiding over it was a man as broken as the marbles he possessed. Lord Elgin’s term as ambassador was over. He had barely made it home: he had been taken prisoner while traveling in France and had languished there for three years before being allowed to return to
Britain. His coffers were empty. His very body had come to resemble the violated perfection of his marbles, since he had contracted an infection in Constantinople and, like a classical statue, had lost his nose. Elgin had only one hope of restoring his lost fortunes: he would have to sell his marbles. But he was keen to stress to his peers that this was not for wanton gain, and he concluded his petition
Respecting his Collection of Marbles
with a noble if self-serving statement.
In amassing these remains of antiquity for the benefit of my Country, and in rescuing them from the imminent and unavoidable destruction with which they were threatened, had they been left many years longer the prey of mischievous Turks, who mutilated them for wanton amusement, or for the purpose of selling them piecemeal to passing travellers; I have been actuated by no motives of private emolument.
The lords and their advisers were not impressed. Richard Payne Knight, a connoisseur of the Society of Dilettanti and founder of the British Museum, listened to his story and replied: “You have lost your labour, my Lord Elgin. Your marbles are overrated: they are not Greek, they are Roman, of the time of Hadrian.” The refined milordi and the dilettanti of Great Britain were not used to gazing upon broken fragments of marble, pitted with shrapnel wounds and worn away by the wind and the rain. To them, this heap of stones represented not an improvement of the arts of Great Britain but a fool’s errand.
There were some who were horrified by the way in which Elgin’s men had destroyed what was left of the unity of the Parthenon to amass this pile of stones. His peer Lord Byron included a devastating attack on Lord Elgin in his poem
Childe Harold
.
Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee,
Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they lov’d;
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defac’d, thy mouldering shrines remov’d
By British hands, which it had best behov’d
To guard those relics ne’er to be restor’d.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they rov’d,
And once again thy hopeless bosom gor’d,
And snatch’d thy shrinking Gods to northern climes abhorr’d.
And he argued that the Parthenon should be allowed to crumble away in the place where it had always stood.
When Lord Elgin went before the House of Lords, he offered his marbles to the nation for the sum of £62,440. The lords laughed in his face and proposed to give him less than half that sum. Lord Elgin appeared before them a second time, and then the House of Lords ordered that he be paid £35,000 for his trouble. Elgin, deeply disappointed, had no choice but to accept.
In that year of 1816, the Elgin marbles were moved into the British Museum, and there they remain. They are now entombed in the Duveen gallery, built especially for them in the 1930s. The gallery inverts the original arrangement of the sculptures, so that the frieze and the pedimental statuary face inward toward a toplit room, rather than outward toward the dazzling marble plateau of the Acropolis. Mutilated, perching on plinths in the gloomy London light, the Elgin marbles confront us at eye height, simultaneously impressive and tragic.
