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

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 toBritain. 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.
    Other pieces of the Parthenon were scattered all over Europe. There are two heads in Copenhagen that fit onto bodies that are now in the British Museum, and there is another one in Würzburg, in Germany. There are pieces in the Vatican, in Vienna, Munich, and Palermo. There are fragments in the Louvre, collected by the defeated and disgraced French from Lord Elgin’s leavings. There are, of course, a few pieces left in Athens, and not many of those are actually affixed to what had once been the