The Elgin Marbles should stay in the British Museum

Earlier this year I was surprised to see my hometown of Palermo in Sicily in the international press in connection with one of the most debated art controversies of all time. The director of the Regional Archaeological Museum was handing over, with much fanfare, a small fragment of the Parthenon Frieze to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens in what is supposed to be an eight-year loan, even if all parties want to make it an indefinite deposit.

The repatriation of the Fagan Fragment immediately reignited the 200-year-old controversy about the Elgin Marbles, with Greek authorities and scholars pleading for the British Museum to follow on the path set by the Sicilian government, already hailed as a “precedent”.

I remember vividly the last building phase of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, as I used to walk by it almost daily while I was studying for a postgrad diploma at the Italian Archaeological School there. I remember the thrill when huge boxes containing some of the most precious remains of Greek statuary were lowered from the Acropolis hill and into the new museum through a system of cranes, before they could install the last glass panels on the northern facade of the huge building.

But what I remember with some discomfort is the day we were allowed to visit the newly-opened museum, when I saw first-hand the hollow concrete cavern, a soulless triumph of utopian engineering, where the visitor is led on a course that passes through the warehouse-themed volumes until they ascend to what is supposed to be the piece de resistance: the Parthenon gallery, emphatically filled with the absence of more than half of the sculptures it is supposed to host.

A possible way out of the impasse has now been suggested by the Institute of Digital Archaeology, which proposes to make a millimetre-perfect copy of the sculptures from Carrara marble blocks carved by a robotic arm, send the originals off to Athens and display the replicas in the British Museum. In an era dominated by fake news, it probably seemed appropriate to suggest that people may still go to the London museum to admire a fake frieze. Strangely enough, nobody has suggested that these near-perfect copies go to Athens instead.

In the museum in Athens, the remaining original slabs are intermixed with white copies of the missing ones, in a stark chromatic contrast that purposely makes viewers aware of what is missing. This disrupts the reading of the monument at every change of colour, instead of following the more common best practice where integrations are clearly identifiable, yet as close as possible to the original.

The viewer must be given the opportunity to appreciate the whole of the artist’s concept, in spite of the wounds of time. The aim of the new display is clear: what you are to admire there is not the beauty and proportion of Pheidias’ masterpiece, but the effort and dedication of the Greek government in making the case for repatriation.

The museum thus becomes a heavily ideologic space, where the Parthenon sculptures are presented as the apex of the Classical civilisation (top floor), in a parabolic depiction of cultural history that privileges one phase against all others, a vision that should be firmly rejected by every self-respecting modern historian.

The new Acropolis Museum is not the only place in Greece where you can see this concept at work. Not far from that spot, on the Acropolis itself, every effort is being made to rebuild the Parthenon, and cancel the marks of two and a half millennia of history that have seen the building become a Christian church, a mosque, a gunpowder store, a source of raw materials and a ruin.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

Supporters of the repatriation, in Greece and beyond, maintain that the Parthenon Frieze belongs to Greece, as it was made in Athens and is part of their cultural identity. The idea of there being a real continuity between the classical Greeks and present day dwellers of the territory of modern Greece is shaky at best and widely challenged.

When it comes to the Parthenon Frieze being a part of cultural identity, this can easily be claimed by everyone who recognizes the Graeco-Roman premises of their national culture, wherever they may live. Those who defend the restitution of the Elgin Marbles tend to discount the huge role they played during their 200 years in London. Who decides that this phase of the life of this monument is not worth preserving?

Most recently, the permanence of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum is seen as a perpetuation of British imperialist attitudes. And yet, those same people forget how much pain and suffering is connected to the very birth of those sculptures, paid with the tribute collected by Athens from its “allies” – the Delian League – and the brutal consequences faced by those cities who were not willing to pay.

Let’s not play into the hands of those who want to read just selected pages of the great book of history, for purposes other than the enjoyment of art or the pursuit of knowledge. Let’s leave the sculptures where they are, so that tourists and scholars from all over the world can continue to recognise themselves in the characters of the immortal procession to honour the goddess of wisdom.

Dr Mario Trabucco della Torretta is an Anglo-Sicilian archaeologist