The Elgin Marbles have been a source of contention and controversy almost from the moment Elgin took them in the first years of the 19th century. He was Envoy Extraordinaire to the Turkish empire between 1799 and 1802, and had the permission of the Turkish authorities to study and remove pieces of classical art from Athens. The purpose of his expedition was to record these monuments as carefully possible so that examples of classical art could be studied by architects and draftsmen back in Britain. The expedition therefore included six artists to make these drawings. At the same time, Harrison, a neo-classical architect, advised Elgin to make casts of these sculptures and reliefs as without having a solid representation of these piece of art in front of them, artists would be unable to reproduce them properly. The expedition duly made moulds of them, and sent them to London.
However, it was claimed that Elgin took the marbles because he and his artists were appalled and the neglect and casual destruction they had suffered under the Turks, and wanted to save them from further destruction. The government Memorandum on the Subject of the Earl of Elgin’s Pursuits in Greece, 1811 states
‘In the prosecution of this undertaking, the artists had the mortification of witnessing the very wilful devastation, to which all the sculpture, and even the architecture , were daily exposed, on the part of the Turks and travellers. …. The Temple of Minerva had been converted into a powder magazine, and been completely destroyed, from a shell falling upon it, during the bombardment of Athens by the Venetians towards the end of the seventeenth century; and even this accident had not deterred the Turks from applying the beautiful Temple of Neptune and Erectheus to the same use, whereby it is constantly exposed to a similar fate. Many of the statues on the posticum of the Temple of Minerva (Parthenon) which had been thrown down by the explosion, had been absolutely pounded for mortar, because they furnished the whitest marble within reach; and the parts of the modern fortification, and the miserable houses where this mortar was so applied, were discovered. Besides , it is well known that the Turks will frequently climb up the ruined walls, and amuse themselves in defacing any sculpture they can reach; or in breaking columns, statues or other remains of antiquity, in the fond expectation of finding within them some hidden treasures.
Under these circumstances, Lord Elgin felt himself impelled, by a stronger motive than personal gratification, to endeavour to preserve any specimens of sculpture he could, without injury, rescue from such impending ruin….. Actuated by these inducements, Lord Elgin made use of all his means, and ultimately with such success, that he has brought to England, from the ruined temples at Athens, from the modern walls and fortifications, in which many fragments had been used as so many blocks of stone, and from excavations made on purpose, a greater quantity of original Athenian sculpture, in statues, alti and bassi relievi, capitals, cornices, frizes, and columns, then exists in any other part of Europe…..
The Parthenon itself, independently of its decorative architecture, is so chaste and perfect a model of Doric architecture that Lord Elgin conceived it to be of the highest importance to the arts, to secure original specimens of each member of that edifice…..’
From: ‘The Controversial Bequest of Lord Elgin’ in C.W. Ceram, The World of Archaeology (London: Thames and Hudson 1966), 49-54 (52-3).
I don’t really know what the solution is to this extremely long-standing artistic and diplomatic controversy, and clearly there are arguments for returning the marbles to Greece as they have called for. But I thought this extract was important as it shows how Elgin and the British government viewed it and the acquisition – or theft – of the marbles at the time.
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