Secret websurfers may like to visit www.electroasylum.com/elgin/ where they will find an imaginative little site whose highlight is its “Elgin Marbles game”. Here you can throw electronic marbles (the round glass variety, not the marble marble sort) at the Seventh Earl; depending on where you hit the poor man, he shudders disquietingly or (if you are right on target) disintegrates in a macromedia display of flashing lights. The Earl’s internet incarnation reminds us how deeply in contemporary culture Elgin and the Marbles are lodged.
The particular debate that is the focus of this conference seems to me, on one level at least, to be a storm in a teacup. I don’t expect most people to agree with me—it is after all part of the definition of a storm in a teacup that the people splashing around in the tea are themselves fully convinced that they’re being buffeted in mid-Atlantic; that the debate is as important as they are committed to making it seem.
But my prediction is that in the fullness of time what did or did not happen in 1937-38, at whose instigation, and for what reasons will not end up mattering very much to archaeologists and to historians of Greek art and culture; it is hard to imagine that it will be anywhere near the top of the archaeological agenda of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, precisely because it is a storm in a teacup, it is a debate of absolutely central importance to a range of other issues—from our most fundamental conception of what an antiquity is, to our notion of the whole role of the museum and its representation of the past in contemporary life. To put this more plainly: wherever you find a controversy invested with a moral fervour and intensity that far outstrips the importance of its ostensible subject, you know that something big is at stake—even if it is not what it seems. In a sense, cultural criticism and cultural history exist to explore the gap between what (for better or worse) I’ll call the intrinsic importance of a case and the cultural valuation put on it.
Let us be clear at the very start that, for all our determination to get to the bottom of what really happened to the Marbles in 1937 and 1938, there is no bottom to be reached, no bed rock of fact that we could hope to expose if only we could get enough documentation. This is partly because of the fragility of any historical argument that relies on motivation, as in part this argument does. The difference, after all, between the conspiracy theory and the cock-up theory of history lies not in the raw evidence, which is identical in each case, but in the interpretation which, for whatever reason, we choose to weave around it. For what it is worth, I veer towards cock-up on this one, but that is not the point. This classic problem lies at the bottom of some of the disagreements that the cleaning controversy has spawned.
But there is more to it than that. The very nature of the case is such that there cannot be a right answer. Anyone who has gone through the ample documentary material collected for us will have seen very quickly that there is no kernel at all of disinterested reportage, but, from the very beginning, both in internal museum documents, press reports and parliamentary questions, we are dealing with a shifting palimpsest of exculpation, enmity, accusation, ambition, moral outrage, bureaucratic correctness—each one driven, in ways that we can now only partly divine, by personal or political interest; everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Arthur Holcombe, from Forsdyke to Epstein, has an axe to grind. The incident is not unusual in this sense.
All crises are multivalent; differently configured for each of their participants; differently motivated; and differently inscribed in language to match. Think of the interpretative gap which separates “chiselled” from “rubbed”; “bribe” from “gift”; “sick-leave” from “alcoholism”; “cleaned” from “scraped”. The documents we have before us are, indeed, wonderful micro-history, but you cannot ransack them for an authoritative account; no new document that you could ever find could answer the impossible question, “What happened?”; And you cannot legitimately find a way out by seizing on single phrases that happen to fit your own explanatory tale.
We can fling convenient quotes back and forth for as long as we like, but it would be misguided, naive and historically inept to suppose that some are closer to the truth than others.
Scholars who study the cleaning debate over the next few centuries will not, I think, be put off by the conclusion that “what happened” in that naive sense is irrevocably lost. For they would be much more interested in the way that the various accounts and disputes (not just in 1937 and 1938, but right up to today and indeed back to the very moment of the Marbles’ first arrival in this country) raise all kinds of questions about the nature and value of the historical object; about the contested relationship between the object’s surface and its “identity”; about what is to count as an original work of art. What drives the cleaning controversy is not just political convenience—we’re not all sitting here just because we think we can turn the controversy to our own advantage; probably, in those terms, none of us is. What drives it is, in part at least, a much more fundamental set of debates about the nature of the ancient art object.
Surface is always a loaded term, and descriptions of the surface condition of the Marbles are inevitably subjective, as are drawings, engravings and photographs. (Here I agree 100% with John Boardman [Lincoln College, Oxford] that no legitimate arguments can be based on comparing old photographs, in unknown lighting conditions, with the current state of the Marbles.) In every debate on the Marbles, descriptions of surface are closely bound with estimations of worth.
Traditionally, those who liked the Marbles enthused; those who didn’t carped. So, for example, in 1816 Richard Payne Knight consistently stressed to the Parliamentary Select Committee that their surface was mostly gone and that its widespread loss made the sculptures much less useful as models to contemporary artists than one might have hoped.
Canova, on the other hand, is attributed with the famous claim, which is, in fact, a skilful paraphrase by Hamilton, that the pieces were of such quality that however much they had suffered, “It would be sacrilege in him, or any man, to presume to touch them with a chisel”.
It is worth pointing out here that far from being an unusual reaction, as it is often treated, this kind of statement, as Canova must have known all too well, was the classic topos of the modern artist confronted with the genius of antiquity; much the same was reported of almost all great Renaissance artists in response to the discovery of some ancient masterpiece from the Laocoön onwards—although the fine words had not in general stopped the application of the chisel.
In more recent arguments, there is a tighter and more self-evident fit between deeming the damage serious and regarding the surface itself as irreparably affected. What is always at issue is the contested relationship between the surviving surface and what we might call the original surface. The crucial question is: if, as must be agreed, the original surface of the object no longer exists, what is the status of what we see? What, in other words, is to count as “original”? Essentially this question gets played out around a series of irresolvable clashes between a variety of different positions. Is the surviving surface, untampered with, to be seen as the closest approximation we can ever have to the original surface? Or is the original surface recoverable, if at all, only by scientific intervention on what survives? Or, again, is the original utterly lost to us, and the surviving surface a changing historical document in its own right?
At this point, I should stress, I am not concerned with who did or did not do what they were or were not authorised to do in 1937-38; I am concerned with how the intense reaction to what was, or was not, subsequently seen and commented on was articulated. We continue to see a variety of these positions on display—the repeated use, for example, of the wonderful oxymoron “original patina”; alternatively the implications of the Greek team’s work that the true surface is not visible to the naked eye (but to magnifying glass or microscope) adds a different slant again to the very idea of “surface”.
The yet bigger question prompted by this is, of course, where the identity of the object is thought to reside: in its surface or its form/depth. Where, in other words, and this is the crucial question, is the hand of Phidias to be detected, in the form or in the skin?
There is also the tricky issue of historicality. If we are committed to seeing ancient sculpture, not as fixed objects, but as evolving pieces of history, where and how do we draw the line? Where does something stop being an act of vandalism and become part of the history of the object? We now all agree that Renaissance interventions in antique sculpture, from high polishing to fantasy restorations, are to be seen in these terms: we would no more think of lambasting Bernini for ruining the Hermaphrodite or his inappropriate, damaging and irreversible additions to the Ludovisi Ares (quite contrary to the terms of the Venice Charter), than we would now even think of tearing off Thorvaldsen’s restorations to the Aegina pediments. At what point, we might ask, will Duveen’s interventions become part of the Parthenon’s history, rather than cause of outrage?
Different periods and different media negotiate these problems differently. Many of you will be familiar with the National Gallery cleaning controversy, which rumbled on from the late Forties to the early Sixties and centred, among other things, on the contested nature of the “original” surface (and colour) of what was revealed by the removal of later accretions.
Others, I know, are familiar with issues in bronze conservation, where the removal of corrosion devastatingly destroys the original surface detail to leave just metal. In the case of the 1930s and marble sculpture, Robert Byron’s letter to the Sunday Times in 1939 evokes precisely these issues, albeit in a frightful muddle: the appearance of the Marbles, he wrote, might have been “improved” by cleaning, but they had not been restored to their “original” appearance—which he then proceeds to equate with the patina of Pentelic marble (no mention of paint or polychromy) and the lifelike quality of the sculptures before the museum’s intervention in contrast to the “deadness” of plaster casts.
Jacob Epstein’s interventions over the Parthenon and other British Museum sculptures take these issues further. As early as 1921, as the documents show, he objected to what he saw as the savage “scraping” of the Demeter of Cnidus and the attachment of a plaster nose (where hers had been lost); and predictably enough he weighed in later in 1939 against the cleaning of the Marbles.
What comes out of these letters is not only a commitment to the idea that original marble is unmixable with the inferior medium of plaster, but also the corporeality of the objects. Epstein writes of these sculptures in terms indistinguishable from the human body: the Demeter was “manhandled”; “an atrocity” was committed against her—and he does indeed call her “her”; while the fate of the Parthenon Marbles is made worse by the fact that they were at the mercy of “six hefty men”. This fudging of the boundary between sculpture and humanity—between, if you like, marmoreal surface and skin, has had a long history; and it is integrally bound up with the modern rhetoric of outrage that has dogged so much of the discussion of the cleaning, particularly, but not only, in the Greek press, where the phrase “torture” (like Epstein’s “atrocity”) is repeatedly applied to what was done in the 30s. Of course, these are metaphors, but they are the metaphors we live by and in whose terms we make sense of and understand the Marbles.
Ideas of elitism, expertise and connoisseurship have also fired this whole debate. These had already been raised in 1921, when Percy Gardner replied to Epstein’s complaint about Demeter’s false nose in surprisingly populist/consumerist terms, and with specific reference to what we would call the museum’s mission. It is strikingly unlike the high-handed academic response that Epstein claimed he had got. It was all very well, wrote Gardner, for a professional sculptor to fire off about the false nose; he had a trained eye and could cope with mutilated statues, without a feeling of aversion. But the museum had a duty to the 99% of people who did not; if a plaster nose helped them to enjoy and understand the Demeter, then so much the better. (There are links here to the idea of Duveen as a consumerist. Perhaps we should not be thinking of the museum in terms of a stark contrast between academic and consumerist goals. The very idea of the museum is in a sense a trade off, a difficult negotiation, between those two. Try replacing the word “consumerist” with “access” or “outreach” and it starts to sound rather different.)
By the time the damage had been reported in the Thirties, the discourse of elitism took a different turn. Much of the coverage concentrated on who could and who could not see the difference; whether it was perceptible only the connoisseur, and of no consequence at all to the layman. In a sense, the ability to spot what had happened to the sculptures and to which ones, became a public proof of aesthetic expertise. Unfortunate errors played into the enemy camp—and did indeed call in question (as they continue to do) quite how visible to the eye any of this interventional actually was. Notoriously, in 1939, the art critic on The Daily Telegraph lamented the fact that Cecrops and his daughter were now “little better than withered stone”, when, in fact, Cecrops and his daughter were casts of sculptures in Athens.
This is still prominent in our own debates. William St Clair is the first to admit that when, in the third edition of Lord Elgin and the Marbles, he referred to the pedimental figure of Iris (“scraped with wire brushes, metal tools, and carborundum. The white left leg, where a patch of residual patina had not yet been removed when the halt was called, looks as if it had been smeared in dog dirt”), he had actually got it wrong. He was talking about a figure that had never been cleaned in the Thirties at all. It is hard to resist the conclusion that under the veneer of connoisseurship, in these cases at least, damage was discovered where it was wanted to be found.
But finally, of course, any scholar of the future reflecting on this whole debate will certainly find in its terms and its rhetoric some clear hints of a cultural agenda rather bigger than its ostensible subject: how objects are to be classified; how their surface is to be understood and treated; who has a right to claim expertise and how; not to mention a whole range of positions on cleanliness and pollution, purity and danger (a memorable article in the Star of 1939 talked in wonderfully humanising terms of giving the Marbles a “wash and brush up”, while Holcombe significantly preferred, maybe, to compare them to his dirty fire grate.) They are also likely to reflect on the role of the Elgin Marbles on the contemporary and historical agenda and, I guess, to compare the cultural role of the marbles in England and those in Athens.
That is not just a question of condition, care, acid rain and London smog; these groups of sculptures now have quite different cultural identities. The Elgin Marbles enjoy (or are vested with) that particular brand of cultural electricity that comes from dispute, contestation and debate. There has never been a moment since their acquisition by Elgin in which they have been off the cultural agenda (it is striking, in fact, to read the 1816 Select Committee Report which already raises almost all the issues that have defined the Marbles debate ever since—including the question of whether they really need to be in their original context). The paradox is that the Elgin Marbles monopolise out cultural attention partly because they have been removed from the place that some people regard as their rightful home. They are valued because of their deracination: that makes them both objects of lamentation and a fetish of the classical past (or one particular Phidian version of it). Objects that have become famous, and, therefore, also important, by being notorious, are the limit case of museum stewardship. No wonder their cracks and scratches, care and control seem to matter.
“In the name of the world’s cultural heritage”
For 200 years, the Parthenon, the greatest symbol of Western civilisation, has remained a mutilated monument after the destructive removal of its most important sculptural, as well as architectural elements by Lord Elgin. The return of the Parthenon Marbles to their place of origin from the British Museum in London constitutes a firm and just request of the Greek government...The request for the return of the Marbles is being made in the name of the world’s cultural heritage, an important and integral part of which is the Parthenon. Greece is not raising the general question of the return of cultural artefacts from Great Britain or other countries...The Greek claim continues to gain recognition, even among the British public and the members of the British and European Parliaments...I believe that the international climate is favourable and, for this reason, I hope that the British Government, with which Greece maintains very friendly relations, will consider positively our request.
Elisavet Papazoi, Greek Minister of Culture
From a statement on the Greek government’s website (www.culture.gr)
