The Parthenon Marbles — Past And Future

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2001 by James Allan Evans

With the eighteenth century, the rediscovery of Greece began. In Britain the Society of the Dilettanti was founded in 1732. Its members were noblemen who had visited Italy where they ate and drank and acquired an appreciation of classical architecture. Europe still knew Greece through a Roman filter, for until Napoleon closed western Europe to Englishmen taking the Grand Tour, only the rare, eccentric traveller visited Greece which was an out-of-the-way corner of the Ottoman Empire. Roman classicism had inspired Palladian architecture which was favoured by the Whig ascendancy in Britain. The Dilettanti were not a Whiggish lot, and perhaps for that reason they wanted to promote Greek architecture through eyes uncorrupted by Palladianism. In 1748 they commissioned James Stuart, a painter-architect, and Nicholas Revett, an architect draughtsman, to visit Greece and produce drawings of as many of the ancient monuments as they could. Stuart and Revett's first volume of The Antiquities of Athens (1762) dealt with minor works and did not cause a great stir, but the second volume in 1787 was a revelation. The last volume appeared in 1794. Stuart and Revett founded the Greek Revival style, and though it was followed by many other 'revivals' such as the Gothic, the Romanesque and the Egyptian, the Greek Revival was the most successful of them all. It would ride the full flood of the nineteenth century romanticism and, in the United States, it became virtually the official architecture of the new republic.

The collectors soon followed. The French were in the forefront. Comte Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul Gouffler became Louis XVI's ambassador to Turkey in 1784. As a young man he had fallen in love with Greece and his pro-Greek sympathies nearly got him into trouble with the Sultan, but he smoothed ruffled feelings adroitly. His agent in Athens was Louis Fauvel who contrived to corner the antiquities market, and imported a wagon from Toulon which was the only conveyance in Athens sturdy enough to carry off large pieces of sculpture. If all had gone smoothly, the Parthenon Marbles', as the Greeks call them, would not be in the British Museum but in the Louvre, which does, in fact, have a small collection including a slab of the Parthenon frieze. But with the French Revolution, Louis XVI lost his head and Choiseul his job. Fauvel continued collecting, and Choiseul eventually returned to live in Paris where he died in 1817. His great collection was sold to the Louvre and to private collectors. But the greatest haul of Parthenon sculptures was to be made by Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, who was inadvertently to impart a new word to the French language: 'elginisme', which the Grand Larousse defines as a 'form of vandalism consisting of taking works of art from their countries of origin to put them in public or private collections'.

In fact, the French play a supporting role in the Elgin affair. On the 'ninth and tenth Thermidor of the sixth year of the First French Republic', 27-28 July, 1798 that is, the first fruits of Napoleon's plunder from Italy reached Paris. The Vatican and the Capitoline museums in Rome had yielded the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus di Medici, the Discobolus, the Laocoon and the Dying Gaul plus sixty or more other pieces. Much more was to come from the Netherlands, Prussia and the smaller German states, but it was Italy that was most thoroughly robbed. The bronze horses over the portal of San Marco in Venice were transported to Paris, and when the Arc de Triomphe was built, they were placed on top of it. They are Roman horses, and not Greek at all, but that was small comfort to the Venetians who attributed them to the great Lysippos.