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The Guardian
The Parthenon marbles are the world's most beautiful art –
and that's why we should give them back
These consummately beautiful sculptures demand a proper setting
– and a trip to Athens has convinced me the Acropolis Museum is that place
The Parthenon marbles –
among the world's most luminous, beautiful art. Photograph: Laurie
Chamberlain/Corbis
What can you do with the world's most beautiful art? Where does
it belong? How should it be cared for and displayed?
The art
in question is the array of sculpture created in Athens in the 5th century BC
to decorate the Parthenon, the temple to Athena that still, today,
dominates the skyline of the Greek capital.
Notoriously,
the best-preserved stone carvings that survived on the temple in the early 19th
century were removed by Lord Elgin and brought to London, where they have
been a fixture of the British Museum ever
since. Equally notoriously, Greece wants the Parthenon marbles (aka
the Elgin marbles) back – and in 2009 opened a
state-of-the-art museum beneath the Acropolis hill on which the
Parthenon stands, to house them.
Where
do the Parthenon sculptures really belong? To get to the just, right, sensible
answer I have to start from my opening claim: this is the world's most
beautiful art. It has only a handful of rivals in the highest rank of artistic
achievement – think Leonardo da Vinci, think Michelangelo.
But the
sculptures of the Parthenon were created 2,000 years before the masterpieces of
the Renaissance. They have a life, energy, calm and grandeur all their
own. The figures of reclining goddesses from the east pediment,
for instance, are daunting yet yielding syntheses of mass and grace that are
more like dreams than objects. The veins that throb on the horse-flanks of a centaur;
the pathos of animals lowing at the sky as they are led to be sacrificed;
such details add up to a consummate beauty that is, I repeat, rivalled only by
the greatest art of the Renaissance.
If the
Sistine Chapel frescoes had been detached from their ceiling in the 19th
century and hung on the walls of the National Gallery, would we appreciate them
as much? No. We'd struggle to imagine the real power of Michelangelo's
paintings in their original location. We'd miss the thrill of stretching our
necks and the excitement of walking through the Vatican to get to them, even the fuss
of queuing. Context is all.
The sad
truth is that in the British Museum, the Parthenon sculptures are not
experienced at their best. For one thing, they're shown in a grey, neoclassical
hall whose stone walls don't contrast enough with these stone artworks – it is
a deathly space that mutes the greatest Greek art instead of illuminating it.
So if the British Museum wants to keep these masterpieces it needs to find the money to totally redisplay them in a
modern way.
Greece's
new Acropolis Museum. Photograph: Stephen Moss
Or, it could give them to Greece, which has already built a
superb modern museum to do just that. The great thing about the Acropolis
Museum's display of the Parthenon sculptures – which currently includes pieces
left by Elgin, plus casts – is that it makes it easy to see how the sculptures
fitted on the building, and how they work as an ensemble. It also has one
advantage London can never rival – you can look from the sculptures to the
museum's glass wall and see the Parthenon itself, making a sensual connection
between the art and its architectural home.
The first time I ever visited the Parthenon I was entranced by
its unique lightness and perfection and thought it absolutely obvious that the
Parthenon marbles need to be in Athens. Then I found out more about the
campaign to return them. It seemed to be too much about national pride, and not
enough about art. I don't care about nationalism, only about the best way to
show this stupendous art so everyone can feel its power. The way the Elgin
Marbles debate has turned art into an ideological plaything is a terrible
distraction from looking at the bloody things.
I got
so alienated by the rhetoric surrounding the Parthenon marbles that I argued
(at the Cambridge Union) against returning them. A lot of the Greek case
remains untrue or unfair. At the new Acropolis Museum, for instance, a video
denounces Elgin for "carrying off" the sculptures. It's not as simple
as that. An honest case for returning this art to Greece has to acknowledge
that it has been looked after well by the British Museum. The pieces of
the sculpture in
London are in superb physical condition. You can see tiny details. That is not
true of the examples in Athens – they have suffered severe damage from
pollution and many have lost all but their rudimentary form.
But that's in the past. In the 1970s when the Parthenon itself
was getting corroded by bad air the sculptures were safer in London. Today,
they belong in the Acropolis Museum.
Nationalist or not, Greece has proved it loves this art and sees
it for what it is. It is Greece, and not the British Museum, that deserves to
be custodian of the world's greatest art, for the world. And for art.
Posted
by
Monday
18 August 2014 08.32 EDTtheguardian.com
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