The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

flames.”
    The Ottoman forces surrendered, and Morosini made his way up to the smoking ruin of which he was now the master. His men set up ropes and pulleys, and they climbed up the face of the building toward the pediment, where the images of Athene and Poseidon were locked in their ancient contest for the suzerainity of Athens. The soldiers were going to do what the Venetians always did: take the statues down and bring them back to Venice, to adorn the piazzas and palaces of their robber republic. But the pulleys came free of their housings and the ropes snapped, and Athene and Poseidon crashed to the ground and smashed to pieces. Morosini walked away from the ruin, and it was returned to the Ottomans about a year later. Other things were more important to the Holy League than a derelict mosque.
    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 worndown 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