The disposition of the Parthenon Marbles is one of the most heated cultural disputes in Britain. The sculptures and bas-reliefs from the Classical Greek temples on the Acropolis of Athens were removed from the statuary in the early 1800s. The British Museum has been home to the marbles since 1816, when they were purchased by the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
The Turks were a foreign force that acted against the will of the people they had invaded and should be returned to Britain. The museum at the foot of the Acropolis would be where the works would be displayed. In May, the country's culture minister, the archaeologist Lina Mendoni, said in a statement to the Guardian, "Lord Elgin used inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so."
The requests have been turned down by the British Museum. Backed by a succession of British governments, the museum has justified keeping the marbles on the grounds that they are part of a shared heritage and that taking them to London helped to safeguard them from neglect.
The British Museum is willing to explore any potential loan with formal acknowledgment of the lender's title to objects and a commitment to return objects. Greece will not acknowledge the lender's title to the objects.
Mary Beard is a professor of classics and a British Museum Trustee. Dr. Beard said that he sees good arguments for returning them and also good arguments for keeping them. She wrote in her book that the temple stood for deracination, dismemberment, desire and loss.
She said that the sculptures of the Parthenon raised some of the biggest questions of cultural property, ownership and where works of art are kept.
The Institute of Digital Archaeology's executive director believes that the long-running dust-up can be solved with the help of 3-Dmachining. A robot has the ability to create faithful copies of large historical objects. The organization unveiled a two-thirds scale model of the Arch of Triumph in Trafalgar Square in London. The original was built by the Romans and was destroyed by the Islamic State.
The relationship between viewers of a monument and what it stands for could be changed by the institute's efforts to revive lost antiquities.
A life-size head of a horse was created by a 3-D printing machine at a workshop in Italy. The prototype of a copy that will be carved from a block of marble quarried on Mount Pentelicus is made of local marble. A week later, the robot will carve a metope, or sculpted panel, of the Centauromachy, a mythic battle between the civilized Lapiths and bestial Centaurs, at the wedding feast of Peirithous and
The copies are supposed to be for the British Museum. The purpose of the organization is to encourage the return of the marbles. Baking a second identical cake is an obvious solution.
He said that the rub was what constituted "identical" in this situation. The only things that matter to the British Museum are its physical qualities and the extent to which they reveal the history and aesthetic of antiquity.
In March, after the museum refused a formal request to scans the pieces, Mr.Michel and Alexy Karenowska, the technical director of the Institute, showed up in the Duveen Gallery. Many of the latest models are equipped with Lidar sensors and photogrammetry software, which allow them to create 3-D digital images.
Lidar is a type of time-of-flight camera that uses waves of light to measure distances as small as a tenth of a millimeter. The data from an image and the photos of an object are combined to create a virtual computer model.
The marble horse head was shaved by a carving robot after it was uploaded into 3-D. The last two models of Pentelic marble will be finished by the end of July, and will be exhibited in London.
Mr.Michel is going to have the robot make two more copies and touch them up to see how the originals would have looked.
Some of the marbles were skinned by British Museum masons. During an ill-judged cleaning operation, a lot of the patina was removed with wire brushes, copper chisels, and coarse carborundum, a harsh abrasive that was deemed inappropriate even back then. The goal was to remove the marble from it's appearance to make it look better. The replicas will have a degree of color restoration. In collaboration with Greek experts, the paint will be applied by hand.
The institute and its model have been criticized by scholars regarding the source of funding, the lack of public consultation and the whiff of British imperialism.
This replication is being asked for by someone. The University of York's Colleen Morgan is an expert in digital archaeology. What population is this replicating? Political implications are what they are. She said that when artifacts become symbols of nationalism and state power, we need to be very careful.
Dr. Mendoni of the Greek Culture Ministry did not reply to the request for comment. Bernard Means is the director of the Virtual Creation lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Means said he would only have tried the project with the full support of Greece. He said that the effort was suggestive of a colonial mind-set where those who appropriated objects without the consent of the colonizers felt they had the right to do with them.
The quintessence of Hellenic architecture is the perfect lines, tall Doric columns along the sides and friezes in high and low relief.
The temple was not completely destroyed for a long time. After Christianity gained a foothold in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the church of the Parthenos Maria became a mosque and a gunpowder depot.
During a siege by the Venetians in 1687, the munitions exploded, killing hundreds of people and tearing off the roof of the building. The Turkish garrison used the carved figures for target practice while the local populace used doorsteps and hearthstone. 40 percent of the temple's original sculptural decoration had been destroyed by the time Lord Elgin arrived in Constantinople.
Some pieces of stone with old inscriptions and figures were allowed to be removed by the Ottomans. About half of the surviving sculptures on the Athenian citadel were carted off by Elgin despite there being no explicit permission to do so.
The country house in Scotland, Broomhall, was supposed to have these ancient treasures. The H.M.S. Mentor foundered off the Greek island of Cythera in 1802. It took more than two years to get the crates back.
He lost his fortune, his wife and the tip of his nose when he was imprisoned for three years in France for being a prisoner of war. The British Parliament paid 35,000 British pounds for the marbles in 1816, less than half the amount he had spent to secure and move them. The artifacts were handed over to the museum.
The campaign to recover the marbles began as soon as they were taken down from the Parthenon. He was ridiculed in the poem "The Curse of Minerva" by Lord Byron, who said that he was a Scottish plunderer.
One of the British Museum's more caustic critics is Mr.Michel, a former public prosecutor. His standoff with the British establishment seems like something out of a comedy show.
He said in an email that it was sad to hang on to the last remnants of colonial grandeur. The battered and broken pieces of whitewashed stone can't teach anyone anything about Ancient Greece. They hold the same nostalgic emotional power for Greeks as any beloved but tattered family heirloom that has somehow passed into the hands of someone else.
The push for cultural artifacts to be returned to their countries of origin is gaining steam. The foot of the Greek goddess Artemis was returned to Athens from Palermo, Italy, in the spring of this year. The British Museum has avoided talking about the British government giving back the marbles. Defending the idea that major museum holdings would be in jeopardy, its defenders argued that the precedent would be set.
Daisy said that the argument will run and run. It is difficult to see how a solution will satisfy both parties.
The case for the return of the relics is strong and persuasive despite the British Museum not yielding.
Tim Schadla-Hall, an Archeologist at University College London, said that the building from which they were taken is still standing. They should be sent back to Greece.
He said that a more relaxed approach to authenticity is accepted by most of us as consumers of the past.
Producing quality facsimiles of the great sculptural works of antiquity and the Renaissance was a Victorian obsession and London museums are crammed with plaster casts of classical originals. The cast courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum hold models of Trajan's Column, Michelangelo's David and the tomb of Henry VII of Luxembourg, all of which are large.
According to Dr. Karenowska, museums don't achieve anything if they are filled with objects that serve the interests of a small group of people. She said that looking after the material remnants of the past was only a small part of the preservation. You can make a connection with an ancient object when you look at it or touch it. A desire to make physical connections with the past is one of the reasons why western culture tends to privilege original objects.
A solution that will please both the British Museum and the Greek government will not be achieved. She said that the biggest hurdle is that the words "copy" and "replica" still mean the same thing. "However strong the intellectual argument, semantics prevail."
She said that it was hard to imagine anyone who wanted the marbles to remain at the British Museum being satisfied with something produced in part by robots.
Is it possible for the British public to believe that exact copies are better than the originals? According to Dr. Karenowska, Britons think of reproductions as 3-D photographs to draw attention to the originals.
A British children's book from 1922 tells of a stuffed rabbit that yearns to be real through the love of his owner. The book says that real isn't how you're made. It is something that happens to you. You become real when a child loves you for a long time, not just for playing with, but also for loving you.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
