Thursday 25 April 2019, Cambridge Union Debate 

This House Would Return Looted Art Back to its Country of Origin

Proposition:

Alice Procter:
Alice is an independent tour guide and art historian, best known for running the often sold-out Uncomfortable Art Tours, telling the ‘ugly truth’ about the artefacts in Britain’s museums.

Dame Janet Suzman:
Dame Janet is a renowned actor and director of both stage and screen and an Academy Award nominee. She is currently co-Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, a significant lobby group working to ensure the Marbles’ return to Athens.

Professor Lord Colin Renfrew:
Hailed as, ‘The Great Restitutionist,’ Lord Renfrew is an archaeologist and Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. He is a former Master of Jesus College and a former President of the Union.

Opposition:

Dr. Kevin Childs
Kevin is a writer and lecturer on art history and has recently developed a series of pieces looking at the contribution to culture and history made by LGBT people over the millennia. He writes regularly for Independent Minds and the Independent.

Neil Curtis
Neil Curtis is Head of Museums and Special Collections at the University of Aberdeen. He is Convenor of University Museums in Scotland, Vice President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and a member of the Ethics Committee of the Museum Association.

Lewis Thomas                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Lewis is a third-year historian at Sidney Sussex College.

Below Dame Janet Suzman's prsentation

Mr President,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               The burning of Notre Dame should remind us all how much a building can mean to a people.

               Fellow debaters, ladies and gentlemen,

               I am here pleading for some exquisite pieces of stone to be returned to their birthplace. They have been given shelter for 200 years and now they need to go home. They can no longer be kept hostages to time.

              I am not the first by a long shot -

              In 1986, Melina Mercouri - in a similar debate in what you no doubt call the Other Place - the Oxford Union - was tremendously moving on this special case - specialbecause of what the Parthenon means to the Greeks…

               …means to the world.

               You might say all of Western culture is predicated on this building. It is the logo of UNESCO. Every classical building in the ancient - and modern world - springs from its genius.

               It's where democracy was born.

               And single-mindedly, incomprehensibly, a mere lordling from these isles cut bits off that edifice, which, so perfect in its symmetry, is a work of art in itself.

               The temple tells the thrilling story of the pan-Athenaic procession - carved in relief by Phydias' incomparable team - surging at a gallop round the entire building; Olympians and their creatures once adorned the pediments.

              These marbles were wrenched from a building that belonged - not to 'the one true god', not a tyrant, nor a king - but to the people.

              And there - astonishingly - it still is. After two thousand years plus it still stands atop the sacred rock, bloody but unbowed, and in the eye-line of millions of Athenians going about their business down below. It is embedded in their national identity.

              Imagine the dome of St Paul's sitting in Potzdammerplatz? A Stonehenge dolmen standing in the Tuileries - no, there IS no national equivalent here.

             I was privileged to have had a meeting with His Excellency, President of the Hellenic Republic, Prokopios Pavlopoulos in Athens last Monday the 15th April, while I was attending a conference on the subject of these marbles.

               He wanted to make a very clear point - that the Greek government has never asked for any other piece of statuary in any other museum in the world to be returned to them. And that it never would.

               On the contrary, he said - the Greeks are very proud that the Louvre has the Winged Victory of Samothrace - they are happy to see it there.  

              They are NOT happy that Elgin attacked the Parthenon. They want their marbles back where they belong.

               The British Museum, via the Dept of Culture, stays tight-lipped. That insulting silence is way past its sell-by date.

              The reply to the President's latest request to re-consider by the Culture Secretary prompts me to offer him this simple advice: "Do NOT attempt to 'follow the logic of restitution to its logical conclusion', Mr Wright". Museum acquisitions were not exactly logically obtained, why should restitutions follow suit?

No slippery-slope-ism allowed; each case on its merits if you please.

                              --------------------------------------------------------

               A brief reminder: Greece was under Ottoman occupation when Lord Elgin was appointed Ambassador to Athens.  

               Napoleon was invading Egypt. So, on the principle of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' sacrificing the Parthenon's glories to Elgin's whims was probably for the Sultan a mere bagatelle.

               However, exactly what 'glories' was Elgin allowed to take? Did the Sultanate specifically designate which?

               Proofs, if they exist, have hitherto skulked in murky clouds of smoke and mirrors.

               There is vague wording in an Italian transcript of a 'firman' - an official permission - in the Elgin archives - which give him leave to take 'qualque pezzi di pietra' - the word qualqueindicating 'some' or 'a few pieces of stone'.

               He was permitted to 'copy, draw, mould and dig' around the base of the Parthenon only.

              Dr Tatiana Poulou, an archaeologist working on the Parthenon site today likened his depredations to the destruction by ISIS of Palmyra. That is, catastrophic.

               Prof Dimitrios Pandermalis, Director of the New Acropolis Museum, understates these barbarisms of Elgin's as: 'at least surrealistic…' as he wryly points out the upper part of this horse and the lower legs of that.

              Scholars have known, and further Turkish research has confirmed that there exist no permissions to take the friezes and pediments, and none to take down the metopes.

               Hence this headline in the Greek edition of The NY Times: Dated April 16th - the day after my meeting with the President:

               "Acropolis Museum director says Ottoman archives debunk the claim Lord Elgin had permission to remove sculptures".

               The historian William St Clair knows more about the smoke and mirrors than anyone and is soon to publish his further findings, and I think he won't mind if I say that the headline above will not rock his boat.       

                                             -------------------------------------------------

               Ladies and gentlemen - there is far too much to say about the manner of Elgin's acquisitions: his huge bribes to Ottoman high-ups, his trail of 'shattered desolation' - as a witness described the rape of the metopes - the ship that sank with the marbles aboard (Poseidon briefly rejoiced!), Elgin's bankruptcy forcing him to sell to the nation instead of hiding them in his Scottish pile. Yes…he had wanted them for himself!

              Elgin was a terrible imperialist, but the truly colonial-imperial act was that of the British Parliament in 1816 in recognizing Elgin's title to his loot by buying it from him. That Act of Parliament thereby claimed 'ownership'.

               But the BM is not a private company with a board of directors. Trustees are required solely to look after things entrusted to their care, not play at politics.

               Does culture exist outside of politics? I think not.

               Anyway, look, it's done. The BM has them.

               The hornet's nest of Ottoman legalities still unravelling leads me to dwell rather on the NOW, not the THEN.

                                -----------------------------------------------------------

               Post-World War II, international laws should surely persuade parliament to re-think its position?

               Questions arise: does an occupying power have legitimacy to dispose of a vassal nation's heritage for the rest of history?

               Should Britain own a mass of foreign heritage for the rest of time?

               The ownership title that Britain exercises today surely should end at these shores?

              The BM's Director, Hartwig Fischer, has developed a trope about separation being a 'creative act'. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? The Marbles are one of the BM's star attractions.

               The Rodin show last year re-inforced the marbles' supremacy in execution and their diminished meaning in isolation.

               The BM once said the Greeks couldn’t look after their own marbles. The stunning New Acropolis Museum opened all of ten years ago, with the Parthenon serenely in view from every glass-walled gallery. One of them empty of its own. But waiting…

               We can't put Humpty together again but now you can visibly link the two - a revelation for visitors.

              The BM is a great encyclopaedic institution - and the Aladdin's Cave of conquest.

               There's a mood abroad that it must wake up to.

               A revolt against colonialist attitudes.

               The violence of the "Rhodes Must Fall" movement at Cape Town University made sure he did. That's the blunt end of hurt feelings.

              The Museums Association takes a more nuanced and ethical approach. When the balance of power was so heavily skewed towards imperial authority, blunt 'no's are not enough, it says. Polls taken in 2012 are 73% for the return of sculptures to Greece.

               The director of the Rijksmuseum recently said: "It's a disgrace that the Netherlands is only now attending to the return of colonial heritage…We should have done it earlier and there is no excuse".

                Guidelines for their return, he suggests, intend to offer a framework similar to existing directives for Nazi loot claims.

               The V & A is showing an open mind, Macron is thinking out of the box, St Mark's horses are back in Venice, Sweden has returned Icelandic Sagas, Easter Island will have its guardians back, Nigeria its Benin figures - and look! - the heavens have not fallen!

              It is high time the BM showed us a heart within the beast. Make models for heavens sakes! - but do the right thing!

             In the name of fairness and morality' said Melina in 1986 'please give them back. Such a gesture from Great Britain would ever honour your name'.    

How the Much-Debated Elgin Marbles Ended Up in England
The author of a new book, Bruce Clarkand his latest article published 11 January 2022, in the Smithsonian Magazine.

When Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, arrived in the city he knew as Constantinople—today’s Istanbul—in November 1799, he had every reason to hope that his mission as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman sultan would be a spectacular success.

A year earlier, Napoleon had invadedOttoman Egypt, and Britain hoped to become the sultan’s main ally in reversing the French conquest. The dispatch from London of a well-connected diplomat descended from the kings of Scotland was itself a gesture of friendship toward the Turks. Then 33 years old, Elgin was an experienced statesman who had previously served as a British envoy in Brussels and Berlin.

As well as competing in geopolitics, the British were vying with the French for access to whatever remained of the great civilizations of antiquity. On this front, too, Elgin was confident of faring well. His marriage in March 1799 to a wealthy heiress, Mary Nisbet, had given him the financial means to sponsor ambitious cultural projects. While traveling through Europe en route to Constantinople, he recruited a team of mostly Italian artists led by the Neapolitan painter Giovanni-Battista Lusieri. Their initial task was to draw, document and mold antiquities in the Ottoman-controlled territory of Greece, thus preserving these ancient treasures on paper and canvas, in part for the edification of Elgin’s countrymen, most of whom would never otherwise see Athens’ statues, temples and friezes.

From the start, though, the artists’ mandate was shrouded in careful ambivalence. Elgin declaredthat simply capturing images of the treasures would be “beneficial to the progress of the fine arts” in his home country. But in more private moments, he didn’t conceal his determination to decorate his home in Scotland with artifacts extracted from Greece. “This … offers me the means of placing, in a useful, distinguished and agreeable way, the various things that you may perhaps be able to procure for me,” he wrote to Lusieri.

The initially cloudy mission of Elgin’s artistic team culminated in a massive campaign to dismantle artworks from the temples on the Acropolis and transport them to Britain. Elgin’s haul—representing more than half of the surviving sculptures on the Athenian citadel—included most of the art adorning the Parthenon, the greatest of the Acropolis temples, and one of the six robed maidens, or caryatids, that adorned the smaller Erechtheion temple. Large sections of the Parthenon frieze, an extraordinary series of relief sculptures depicting a mysterious procession of chariots, animals and people, numbered among the loot.

Among critics, the removal of the so-called Elgin Marbles has long been described as an egregious act of imperial plunder. Greeks find it especially galling that Elgin negotiated the removal of such treasures with the Ottoman Empire, a foreign power that cared little for Hellenic heritage. Calls to return the sculptures to Athens began in Elgin’s own day and continue now: While in London in November 2021, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stated plainly that Elgin “stole” the ancient artworks. (The British Museum, for its part, has always insisted that its mandate of displaying its collections for the purpose of public education does not allow it to simply give objects away.)

Does Elgin deserve his terrible reputation? He certainly derived little personal happiness from his antiquarian acquisitions. While making his way back to Britain in 1803, he was detained in France by the government. He returned to his native shores three years later, in 1806, only to find that many of the artifacts he had collected were still stuck in Greece. Getting them to England would take six more years: Beginning in 1807, the earl was involved in acrimonious divorce proceedings that left his finances in ruins, and he had to implore the state to buy the objects whose extraction he had financed. In the end, the government acquired the trove for £35,000—less than half of what Elgin claimed to have spent employing Lusieri and his team, arranging sea transport, and bribing Ottoman officials. He was denounced as a vandal in sonorous verses by the poet Lord Byron, a fellow member of the Anglo-Scottish aristocracy, and the broader British public alike. If Elgin deserved punishment, he got a good deal of it in his own lifetime. But in the eyes of posterity, he has fared still worse.

In blurring the line between documenting the antiquities of Greece and taking them away, Elgin was following a template created two decades earlier by the French. A promising French artist, Louis-Francois-Sebastian Fauvel, received an assignment in 1784 from his country’s ambassador to the Ottoman sultan to make exact drawings and casts of Greek antiquities. By 1788, the French envoy was urging his young protégé, then at work on the Acropolis, to go much further than drawing or molding: “Remove all that you can, do not neglect any means, my dear Fauvel, of plundering in Athens and its territory all that is to be plundered.” After his diplomatic boss fell out of grace amid the French Revolution, Fauvel became an antiquarian and energetic looter in his own right. When Elgin took up his post in Istanbul in 1799, he and his compatriots saw it as their patriotic duty to outdo the French in this race to grab history.

Also of note is the fact that Elgin was often surrounded by people whose zeal for the removal of Greek antiquities outpaced his own. These individuals included his ultra-wealthy parents-in-law, whose money ultimately made the operation possible, and the shrewd English clergyman Philip Hunt, who worked as Elgin’s personal assistant. When he learned of his appointment to Elgin’s staff, Hunt explained to his father that the job seemed a “brilliant opportunity of improving my mind and laying the foundation of a splendid fortune.”

In spring 1801, Hunt went to Athens to assess the progress being made by Lusieri and his artistic team. He realized that simply gaining access to the Acropolis, which also served as the Ottoman garrison, would require a burdensome series of presents and bribes to local officials. The only solution, he concluded, was to secure an all-purpose permit from some high-ranking person in the entourage of the sultan. By early July, Hunt had induced the deputy to the grand vizier to issue a paper that would allow Elgin’s team to work unimpeded on the Acropolis: to draw, excavate, erect scaffolding and “take away some pieces of stone with old figures or inscriptions,” as the permit put it.

Over the following month, the situation devolved rapidly. With Napoleon apparently on the verge of invading Greece, Hunt was sent back to Athens on a fresh mission: to reassure Ottoman officials of British support and ward off any temptation to collaborate with the French. Seeing how highly the Ottomans valued their alliance with the British, Hunt spotted an opportunity for a further, decisive extension of the Acropolis project. With a nod from the sultan’s representative in Athens—who at the time would have been scared to deny a Briton anything—Hunt set about removing the sculptures that still adorned the upper reaches of the Parthenon. This went much further than anyone had imagined possible a few weeks earlier. On July 31, the first of the high-standing sculptures was hauled down, inaugurating a program of systematic stripping, with scores of locals working under Lusieri’s enthusiastic supervision.

Whatever the roles of Hunt and Lusieri, Elgin himself cannot escape ultimate responsibility for the dismantling of the Acropolis. Hunt at one point suggested removing all six of the caryatid maidens if a ship could be found to take them away; Elgin duly tried find a vessel, but none were available.

Still, once back in England, Elgin adamantly claimed that he had merely been securing the survival of precious objects that would otherwise have disappeared. In evidence provided to a parliamentary committee, he insisted that “in amassing these remains of antiquity for the benefit of my country, and in rescuing them from imminent and unavoidable destruction with which they were threatened, … I have been actuated by no motives of private emolument.” Betraying the bigotries of the day, Elgin argued that if the sculptures had remained in Athens, they would have been “the prey of mischievous Turks who mutilated [them] for wanton amusement, or for the purpose of selling them to piecemeal to occasional travelers.” He outlined examples of numerous important Greek monuments that had disappeared or been damaged during the previous half-century. In offering these justifications, he was trying to persuade the committee that he had enlarged the scope of his antiquarian project—from merely drawing or molding ancient sculptures to taking them away—only when it became clear to him that the unique treasures were in danger.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of these claims. Upon his arrival in Istanbul, the earl had declared an interest in decorating his own house with ancient treasures. But even if Elgin’s argument was dishonest, his point about the likely fate of the artifacts, given the geopolitical situation at the dawn of the 19th century, is a serious one. We can assess its merit in light of what actually happened to the sculptures that stayed on the Acropolis (because Elgin’s people didn’t quite manage to remove them all) versus those that were shipped to England.

Contrary to Elgin’s stated fears, the sculptures that remained in Athens did not vanish. After 1833, when the Ottomans left the Acropolis and handed it to the new nation of Greece, the great citadel and its monuments became a focus of national pride. Protecting, restoring and showcasing the legacy of the Athenian golden age has been the highest priority for every Greek government since then.

 Of course, the monuments and artifacts of the Holy Rock, as Greeks call it, have not entirely escaped damage. Scorch marks from a fire during the 1820s Greek War of Independence, during which the Acropolis changed hands several times, remain visible today. In recent years, the contours of some sculptures have been worn away by air pollution—a problem that was particularly acute in the 1980s. But Elgin’s people also caused damage, both to the sculptures they removed and to the underlying structure of the Parthenon. (“I have been obliged to be a little barbarous,” Lusieri once wrote to Elgin.) Then there were the marbles that sankon one of Elgin’s ships in 1802 and were only salvaged three years later. Even after they arrived at the British Museum, the sculptures received imperfect care. In 1938, for example, they were “cleaned” with an acid solution.

With the benefit of two centuries of hindsight, Elgin’s claim that his removal of treasures from the Acropolis was a noble act, in either its intention or its result, is dubious at best. Still, the earl’s professed concern for the preservation of the glories of ancient Athens raises an interesting line of thought. Suppose that among his mixture of motives—personal aggrandizement, rivalry with the French and so on—the welfare of the sculptures actually had been Elgin’s primary concern. How could that purpose best be served today? Perhaps by placing the Acropolis sculptures in a place where they would be extremely safe, extremely well conserved and superbly displayed for the enjoyment of all? The Acropolis Museum, which opened in 2009 at the foot of the Parthenon, is an ideal candidate; it was built with the goal of eventually housing all of the surviving elements of the Parthenon frieze.

Of the original 524-foot-long frieze, about half is now in London, while another third is in Athens. Much smaller fragments are scattered elsewhere around the globe. The Acropolis Museum’s magnificent glass gallery, bathed in Greek sunlight and offering a clear view of the Parthenon, would be a perfect place to reintegrate the frieze and allow visitors to ponder its meaning. After all, British scholars and cultural figures who advocate for the sculptures’ return to Athens are careful to frame their arguments in terms of “reunifying” a single work of art that should never have been broken up.

That, surely, is a vision that all manner of people can reasonably embrace, regardless of whether they see Elgin as a robber or give him some credit as a preservationist. If the earl really cared about the marbles, and if he were with us today, he would want to see them in Athens now.

Bruce Clark wrote this article for the Smithsonian Magazine and it was published online on 11 Janyary 2022.