Romancing the Stones
By Cathleen McGuigan
| NEWSWEEK
Published Jun 6, 2009
From the magazine issue
dated Jun 15, 2009
It's not polite to call the Elgin Marbles the Elgin Marbles anymore.
Not even in the British Museum, where the ancient Greek sculptures and reliefs have resided since the
early 19th century, after a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire named Lord Elgin hacked them
off the Parthenon.
Even in that age of imperialism, many Brits saw Elgin's acts as cultural vandalism. Lord Byron slammed
the marbles' removal in his bestselling epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
The call for their return has grown since Greece won its independence from Ottoman rule in 1829, led by the Greek government in particular since the 1980s. In the noisy debate over the restitution of ancient artworks to their original locale, no case is more controversial or inflamed than the question of the Parthenon marbles: should the British finally send them back?
Later this month a new Acropolis Museum will open in the shadow of the Parthenon in Athens.
The building is more than a bold composition in glass, steel, concrete and stone: it is architecture as argument, explicitly meant to sway opinion over the fate of the marbles. Designed by the Swiss-born,
New York–based Bernard Tschumi, the three-level structure begins to express its agenda in the way it defers to an ancient settlement that was discovered during excavation of the construction site. (The building was adapted so that it is raised on concrete pillars, allowing archeological work to continue beneath it—and with glass floors that will give visitors a dramatic view of the ongoing dig.)
But it's the crown of the museum that will make the most powerful case for restitution: the top floor is a glass box that is canted at an angle away from the structure beneath it—like an uneven stack of cartons—so that it lines up perfectly with the Parthenon, visible about 1,000 feet away.
Many of the Parthenon's original sculptures were lost or destroyed over the centuries; those remaining on the temple were removed in recent years because the pollution in Athens was eating away the marble. Now, along with other sculptures, the frieze that encircled the temple—it depicts a procession of figures, some bringing sacrifices—is installed in the new museum in its original configuration on the Parthenon.
To accentuate the ghostly absence of the missing marbles, there are white plaster copies to fill the gaps.
