The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories Read Online Free PDF
Author: Edward Hollis
in 1800, but theAthens 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 behindin 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.
To erect scaffolding and to dig where they may wish to discover the ancient foundations.
Liberty to take away any sculpture or inscriptions which do not interfere with the works or walls of the citadel.
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
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 behindin 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.
To erect scaffolding and to dig where they may wish to discover the ancient foundations.
Liberty to take away any sculpture or inscriptions which do not interfere with the works or walls of the citadel.
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
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